The Prince and the Pennines
by Metatrix
Summary: Fifteen year old Severus is thrilled to finally call Lily his girlfriend. But if she loves him, why does she want to change everything about him? Can Sev keep Lily without losing his friends - and himself - in the process? Meanwhile, the Ministry is ruthlessly eliminating its political opponents and a new group called the Knights will stop at nothing for justice. SS/LE LE/JP SS/NM.
1. The Unbreakable Vow

**Author's Note:** This prologue is the start of a 3-part epic that will span (with gaps) primarily Severus Snape's life from 1975 until 1981. All three parts are planned out in detail, and this story has taken my poor head hostage for the better part of a decade, so I will have to finish it in order for it to leave me alone. Strictly speaking, this story is not AU — it follows the events and facts of canon (by canon, I mean the books only; I pick and choose from Pottermore whatever suits my fancy). However, it is a radically different interpretation of canon than what is typically seen in most Harry Potter fanfictions. At times, it will purposely read against canon. Characters may appear OOC at times, particularly as they grow older. What can I say — Sev won't let me write him any other way. Also, this story is not for the kidlets. There will be sex, drugs, and many varied combinations of sex and drugs. (Also some rock n' roll.) Sev grew up in the 70s, and let's just say he took advantage of what the decade had to offer.

This prologue is actually a scene from the second part of the series, "The Prince and the Proletariat," which is why it is set after Hogwarts. I have posted the summary for Proletariat up on my profile if anyone is interested. The next chapter will start us back to December 1974, and we will go on from there.

This chapter was beta-read by the lovely aberrantstrain, who not only helped with the proofreading, but spent hours over skype listening to me blather on about my characters and helped me to hash out the plot and structure of this story. Her SS/LE stories, "Amorestmorta" and "Dittany and Datura" were a major inspiration for me, and I highly recommend you give them a read (they are on this website).

Finally, this is my first Harry Potter fanfiction, and the first extended piece of writing I have ever done, so feedback (of any kind) is highly appreciated.

**Prologue: The Unbreakable Vow**

The water slapped against the docks, and in its oily sheen one could see a row of abandoned warehouses hunkered down together like beggars huddled against the cold. The warehouse at the end of the row shimmered faintly in the dead of night with the muggle-repelling and unplottable charms cast upon it. Inside the dank warehouse, a tall man with an unnaturally handsome face, paced leisurely in front of a shivering red-haired woman and her male companion. They were surrounded by a half-dozen masked onlookers, their wands out and pointed at the woman.

The tall man halted his pacing, seeming to come to a decision. Brown eyes met green.

"It seems I have severely underestimated you, Lily Potter." The man called Riddle smiled. "Tell me, have you had a change of heart? Would you like to leave the Order behind and join us in our cause?"

The woman's dark-haired companion drew a shaky breath, its sound echoing in the eerie quiet of the warehouse.

Lily Potter raised her chin. "No, I haven't changed sides. And with all do respect, sir, I will never join you." Her voice rose over the unified gasp that swept the warehouse. "That is not why I did this."

"Then why —?"

"I did it because I had to." Her eyes darted momentarily to her pale-faced companion. "I did it for Severus."

The onlookers broke out in whispers as Severus silently regarded Lily, an inscrutable look on his face. He reached out to squeeze her hand. She squeezed back.

Riddle raised his hand and the whispers fell away. "Come, Severus, Mrs. Potter, let us speak in private for a moment. The rest of you, return home. We will reconvene again as previously planned. Not a word to anyone about anything that transpired tonight." One by one, the onlookers apparated away, until only three people were left in the old warehouse. The smell of rotting wood and fetid water was heavy on the stagnant air of the docks, permeating the warehouse through the cracked windows.

Riddle paced for some time again, Lily and Severus watching him silently, their fingers still intertwined. Finally, he turned to them once more.

"What you did tonight, Mrs. Potter, well it is not an insignificant boon to our cause. I know your only motivation was to save Severus, here. I understand you have no desire to switch sides, to join us…you have made that quite clear." Riddle shook his head with a rueful smile. "Regrettable though that may be…well, nevertheless, what you did tonight, very few would have had the nerve to do so. And you have shown tremendous loyalty to one of our own." Here, his eyes flickered over to Severus before he continued. "You have also put yourself in quite the difficult position with regards to the law. Your actions tonight will have to be kept secret if you are to retain your freedom." Lily tensed at his words, gripping Severus's hand so tight her knuckles turned white. "I want you to know, Lily Potter, that you have nothing to fear from me going forward. Because of the depth of loyalty you have shown in keeping Severus safe, and the tremendous help you were to us tonight, unintentional though it may have been, I will grant you amnesty. I will be no more threat to you, Lily Potter. From now on, it shall be only Dumbledore's wrath and the Ministry's aurors that you have to fear, if your secret should ever be discovered."

Lily drew her hand out of Severus's hold, and took a step forward. "Thank you, sir, but forgive me if I remain skeptical of your amnesty. We remain on opposite sides of a civil war here."

Riddle cast her — and Severus behind her — an appraising look. "Alright then, as a show of my good faith, I will vow it," he said, kneeling regally in front of Lily. "Severus, will you do us the honour?"

Lily and Severus exchanged a bewildered glance, but she dropped to her knees when Severus beckoned her to do so. Severus came to stand over them, his wand drawn in his left hand. He held his breath, darting glances between the two kneeling figures. Riddle held out one long-fingered hand, and after another quick glance at Severus, Lily laid her own hand atop Riddle's. Severus placed the tip of his ebony wand to their clasped hands and waited.

"I, Tom Marvolo Riddle, do vow the following to you, Lily Evans Potter: I vow to not bring you any physical harm." Riddle paused as a thin purple flame burst forth from Severus's wand, binding the two joined hands together. "I vow to grant you amnesty from the Knights and to ensure that none affiliated with the organization will bring you any physical harm." Another flame intertwined with the first. "And, I vow not to reveal what transpired tonight and to ensure that no Knight will reveal it either. These things I do vow to you, and let me be held to my vow upon pain of death." The third flame shot forth, forming a Celtic knot with the first two.

After it was done, Lily slowly stood up. Her previous outward calm seemed to have melted away and she was visibly shaking. Her eyes remained fixed on the stained concrete floor, even as Severus's hand came to rest upon her shoulder. Finally, she allowed him to tug her into an embrace and turn them on his heel, apparating them away.

The moment they landed in the dark sitting room of Spinner's End, Lily wrenched herself from Severus's arms and roughly pushed him away. The room was so narrow that he nearly crashed into the musty bookshelf behind him. He reached out for her reflexively, but recoiled at the hardness in her eyes.

"Don't," she said, her own outstretched arm, a warning. "Don't touch me. It's been a _year_, Severus. You don't get to touch me anymore."

What little blood was left in his face drained at her quiet declaration, but he nodded imperceptibly. She began to pace. He watched her.

"I always knew it would come to this," she muttered at the dusty floor. "My friends…they all tried to warn me. They saw what I didn't want to see. They tried to tell me that you would join them one day and drag me down with you." Lily stopped pacing and shook her head at the floor. "I thought…I thought if I married James, I thought if I moved on, if I was finally free of you….but no, you can't escape your fate." Suddenly, her head snapped up, narrowed eyes piercing him. "Was it worth it?"

Severus remained quiet, staring past Lily at a crack in the far wall.

"I thought you were dead, you know," she continued blithely, in a conversational tone. "You disappeared without a word and I thought something had happened to you. I thought you were _dead._" She paused. "You couldn't have left me a goddamn note? 'Hey, Lily, don't worry about me. I've just left you and run off to join the death eaters. Don't take it personally.'"

Severus ducked his head, clasping his hands behind his neck, the tension visible in the set of his shoulders. "I couldn't….I didn't know how to tell you. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"You're sorry?" Lily gaped at him in utter disbelief. "I couldn't get out of bed for a month, and you're sorry? You — you coward," she spat.

Severus' face twisted in agony at the word. "Lily…please," he whispered miserably, but she wouldn't relent.

"I grieved for you, you fucking piece of shit."

He flinched. The silence stretched between them.

"Show it to me," she finally whispered.

"What—?"

"Your mark…I want to see it." After everything that had happened tonight, there could no longer be any doubt as to what Severus had become, but Lily still had not seen the mark itself.

"Lily…" he pleaded with her wretchedly.

"SHOW IT TO ME!" Severus jumped at her guttural scream, but quickly unbuttoned his left sleeve to reveal the skull and snake branded into his forearm. Lily stared at it in silence, her eyes wide.

Then, all of a sudden, her face crumpled, her mouth falling open in a raw-sounding wail. She doubled over, clutching at her middle as if she had been kicked. Still bent over, she turned her face, staring back up at Severus through a waterfall of crimson hair. Her mouth still hung open, though the scream had died in her throat. Tears and snot streamed down her face, which was stretched into a rictus of mad grief and betrayal. For several agonizing moments they remained frozen in a silent tableau of their combined heartbreak. Finally, Lily's knees gave out and she crashed to the floor, rocking back and forth with the force of sobs so violent that she began to hyperventilate, unable to catch her breath. The sound snapped Severus into action, and he lurched forward, enveloping Lily in his arms.

But Lily struggled against him, flailing and kicking and biting any part of him that she could reach, like a woman possessed. Severus tightened his hold, barely flinching as her blows landed. The tighter Severus clutched at her, the harder Lily fought. She managed to maneuver her body around so that her back pressed against Severus's chest, and she used the position to her advantage, wrenching them both to their feet. In a desperate bid to throw him off, she flung her entire body backward, catching Severus in the nose with the back of her head, as her legs kicked out wildly in the air in front of her. Severus was bleeding from his nose, and from where she had clawed at his hands and forearms, trying to pry them apart from around her waist. Still, he held on. When Lily twisted in his grasp and knocked an elbow into his jaw, Severus overbalanced and landed on his back, his own body breaking Lily's fall. Somehow they end up facing one another, both on their knees, Severus's bleeding arms still locked around her waist.

"I hate you! I hate you!" Lily gasped, pounding futilely against his chest. "How could you? How could you do this to me? I loved you!" she wept brokenly. "I hate you. I hate you," she repeated, her voice barely a whisper. Finally, she gave up the fight. "I loved you," she cried softly against Severus's neck, her tears mingling with his.

"Shhh…Lily, I know. I know," Severus murmured, rocking her gently in his arms. She wound her arms around his neck, clutching him to her desperately. "I'm back, Lily, and I'm never letting you go again. It's all going to be different from now on. You'll see. It'll be you and me against the world, Lily. Like it was. Like it was meant to be. Always." Severus brushed a kiss to the hollow behind her ear. "I promise."


	2. A White Christmas

**Author's Note:** Thanks again to aberrantstrain, who reminds me that my characters do not, in fact, live in a physical vacuum.

**A White Christmas**

It was Christmas day, and the Evanses had invited Severus over, much to Petunia's chagrin. For Lily's sake, Severus had tried his utmost to be polite with her, and had even volunteered to help out in the kitchen under Petunia's watchful eye. She had been mollified somewhat when she had seen the precision with which he had sliced the carrots, each identical piece exactly one eighth of an inch thick and on the same forty-five degree angle. He had been careful to do everything to Petunia's exact specifications, and when she couldn't find a single thing to complain about, they eventually settled into a reluctant sort of peace. When Severus glimpsed the look of delight and gratitude on Lily's face, he knew it had been worth holding his tongue.

Dinner had been a warm and friendly affair. The Evanses had always liked Severus, although he privately thought it was due to a mixture of pity as well as relief that someone they knew was looking after their daughter both while she was away at Hogwarts and when she was walking the increasingly unsafe streets of Cokeworth. Severus's upbringing didn't work against him. On the contrary, the Evanses trusted their daughter's safety in his hands even more, knowing that a boy needed to be street smart, tough, and wary of his surroundings in order to escape Spinner's End unscathed.

This should have been a relaxing meal for Severus — would have been a relaxing meal, except that his stomach was roiling with butterflies over what was determined to do tonight at some point before he returned home. He had resolved to finally bite the bullet and kiss Lily Evans tonight. And it had to be tonight. When Severus set his mind to something, he was bound to accomplish it one way or another. He had been waiting for the perfect moment to do it ever since term had started, and he was now tired of dragging it out. It would be better just get it over and done with, even if the unthinkable happened and Lily rejected his advances.

But Severus was fairly confident that she wouldn't reject him. In fact, he never would have worked up the nerve to make a move if he hadn't been nearly sure that she felt the same way as he did. Merlin knew why or how, but Lily Evans did indeed fancy him — he knew it because he had seen and felt it in her mind. And what's more, he knew that the reason that he was seeing it in her mind was because Lily was deliberately letting down her mental shields and _letting _him see it. Years of honing his legilimency by practising on Lily had turned her into a superb occlumens, even more so when it came to blocking Severus, specifically. He had invaded her mind so many hundreds of times over the past four and a half years that she had come to instinctually recognize the unique signature of his mental presence, and effortlessly occlude against it. And shut him out she had, increasingly, ever since the start of third year. It was subtle, but Severus had begun noticing a distinct absence of thoughts and feelings regarding himself. It was a glaring omission, given how much a part of her life (and, previously, a part of her mental landscape) Severus had been. Severus, too, had pulled back, making fewer and fewer cerebral overtures, and ensuring that there was not a trace of his feelings for her in the impressions that did he did provide her. So it had gone on, and with Severus inhabiting Lily's mind less and less often, they had started to gradually grow apart. Even grown apart, they were still closer than best friends ought to be. But they had lost that enmeshment that had characterized their friendship from the beginning, and each had set up some boundaries, some privacy. Severus had wondered at Lily's retreat, and at first he had assumed that she suspected that he fancied her, and was blocking him to spare his (unrequited) feelings. So he had resigned himself to the mental distance, and renegotiated the rules of their friendship.

This had gone on until the start of term in September, when something remarkable had taken place. Lily's mind had started tentatively reaching out to him, and this time she was offering scraps of romantic thoughts — romantic thoughts about him. Severus would return each overture with a mental offering of his own, and his invasions had softened into something like a playful caress. And over the past couple months, a game of cerebral flirtation had developed between them — without a single word or touch. All of their feelings for each other remained strictly unspoken, as keeping it to a flirtatious game of legilimency allowed them both to hide behind the safety of plausible deniability.

But these mental exchanges had started to imbue every single look between them — every single accidental brush of the hand or awkward moment of silence — with an almost unbearable sexual tension. And it was driving him mad. Driving him even more mad because Lily was gradually allowing him to feel her own sexual tension as well. Experiencing her desire on top of his own was so intense that Severus was unable to focus in any of the classes they shared or get any work done sitting beside her in the library. To cope with the nearly constant sexual frustration, he had taken to wearing his loosest set of robes, keeping books open on his lap instead of the desk in front, and showering at least twice a day. His hair had never been so clean. He knew that Lily was just as badly off — he could feel the frustration radiating off her in waves when it overwhelmed her mental barriers — but at least, being a girl, she could hide it better.

He had been sensing it coming off her all throughout dinner as they sat together. Lily's foot had accidentally bumped his under the table, but she had not moved it away. The top of her foot was instead ever so slightly brushing against his Achilles tendon. It was such an innocent gesture under regular circumstances, but Lily had quite deliberately lowered her barriers, and the knowledge that she was desiring him at this very moment was his own undoing.

"Sev, can you pass the gravy?"

"…huh?"

"The gravy, Sev…can you pass it to me?"

"Oh right, sorry. Here you go." As he passed it to her, their hands brushed together at the base of the gravy boat. At that very moment, their eyes met, and he saw an image of himself kissing her, hands tangled in her hair. It was over in a flash, and he suddenly realized that they were both still holding onto the gravy boat, and her thumb was — was — Merlin, there was no other name for it — her thumb was caressing his. Severus almost dropped the boat. He hastily tore his eyes away from hers, trying to steady the wild beating of his heart. That image — it had been Lily's, from some fantasy or dream. He was sure of it. Or — or could it have been a product of his own feverish mind, and he had mistaken it for hers? Was he imaging things? Was he reading into her touches and glances something that wasn't there? He might have assumed so, if it hadn't been for the gentle caress of her thumb, and the footsie under the table. No, it couldn't be a coincidence. She had to have done it on purpose.

Just as he had managed to get himself back under control, Severus felt something brush against his outer thigh under the table. It was the back of Lily's hand, and he shivered as she gently trailed her fingertips down to his knee, and then back up again, agonizingly slowly. He was mortified as his body responded to her touch, and he gave thanks to the long tablecloth obscuring his lap. Merlin! What was she doing to him? Was she enjoying it? Teasing him while he was trapped at the dinner table with her parents, grandparents, sister, aunts, and uncles? Severus's entire body flushed and trembled with need, and if she kept this up, he would need to excuse himself to the bathroom and quickly take care of himself, something he had never wanted to do in the Evans' bathroom. Just when Severus thought he couldn't take any more of this, Lily's hand moved away, and he felt equal parts relieved and bereft without her touch.

After dinner, Mrs. Evans sent Severus and Lily out to the yard to look for tinder for the fireplace while she and Petunia cleared the table. It was a clear night, and with the new moon, the only light came from the stars and from inside the house. The weather was brisk, but it had not yet snowed this year. Lily grabbed his hand and pulled him behind the large oak tree, saying something about how they could find more tinder back there. But Severus couldn't help but notice that they were now in total seclusion. Had she brought him back here for the tinder, or for something else?

"I wish we had a white Christmas this year," Lily sighed, looking up at the sky. Severus closed the distance between them, until he was standing right in front of her.

"Close your eyes," he said, and she complied. He took a moment to just stare at her in a way that he didn't dare to do if her eyes were open.

"Sev…what's this about?" she whined in that way of hers that he should have found annoying, but found hopelessly endearing instead.

"Just keep them closed." He looked up at the night sky and gathered all the magic within himself. He concentrated as hard as he could, visualizing what he wanted, willing it to happen. A few seconds later, a small flurry of snowflakes started coming down. He had made it snow, in a column that was just large enough to contain the both of them. Outside that small circle it wasn't snowing at all. It was as if they were in their own private winter wonderland. As the first few snowflakes touched down on the tip of Lily's nose, she gasped in delight and opened her eyes to look at him.

"Sev, you made it snow! How on Earth did you _do_ that? You didn't use your wand did you? You know we can't outside of school –"

"Don't worry, no wand," he said quickly.

"You made it snow without even using your wand? How?!" Lily's eyes were wide with astonishment and wonder, and he knew that he had truly impressed her. He resolved to do whatever he could to see that look directed at him again in the future.

"I, er, just sort of willed it to happen."

"You just willed it to happen?" she asked with a touch of disbelief, eyes narrowing.

"I've been practicing that one for a while," he admitted. He was good, but he wasn't that good. She smiled at him then, an absolutely radiant smile that made his knees weak, and reached for the ends of his Slytherin scarf, taking a step toward him. Then she turned her face upward and stuck her tongue out, and every time she caught a snowflake with it, she giggled a little bit. Within moments, Lily's eyelashes, face, and hair were all peppered with snowflakes. She was mesmerizing.

"Oh look, Sev! It's a shooting star!"

Severus reluctantly tore his eyes away from her face and looked up to where she was pointing. She was right, there was a shooting star. "Quick, make a wish!" He obliged. They both looked back down, and Severus realized just how close they were to each other. Their feet were nearly touching, and he could feel her breath warming his face. Lily must have noticed their proximity as well, for she suddenly looked down at the ground and fidgeted with his scarf, wrapping the ends around her hands. The silence was heavy between them, and his stomach flipped with anticipation. He had to do it now. He had been waiting for the right moment for months, and this was it. It was almost nauseatingly perfect.

"Lily." He whispered her name, and for a second he thought she hadn't heard, but then she looked up and caught his eye. And what he saw in those eyes nearly took his breath away. Her barriers were fully down now, and he sensed her anticipation and nervousness…and something else. Something different from the sexual desire she had been emanating during dinner. He felt something tender…something akin to love. Was it possible that what Lily felt for him went beyond mere infatuation? Could it be that she felt as strongly for him as he did for her? Severus gathered up all the love he felt for her, all the love he had always felt for her, ever since he was a boy, and pushed it through to Lily, so that she would know exactly what she meant to him.

"Sev." Her voice was something between a gasp and a sigh, and her eyes were brimming with tears. They stood that way for several long minutes, neither of them moving an inch, their eyes still locked upon one another, their minds connected within a whirlwind of emotion. He didn't even know anymore which feelings were hers and which were his own — where he ended and she began. He knew this was it; he knew he had to do it now, but he felt frozen in time, unable to close the distance between them. Just as the tension between them was becoming unbearable, she broke the silence again with a soft whisper: "What did you wish for?"

Severus's heart was hammering in his chest now, and he had become light headed. He was terrified, but the eggnog and the darkness had given him just the little push of courage he needed, and he knew if he didn't do it now, he would always regret it. There would never be another moment as perfect as this one. With his left hand, he grabbed the end of her red and gold scarf and wound it around his hand the way she had done with his. With his right, he gently caressed her cheek, catching the snowflakes on her face with the backs of his fingers. His hand was trembling now, but he continued to slowly trail it down past her shoulder and down her scarf, winding it around to match his other hand and both of her own.

"This," he said. Then gripping her scarf tightly in both of his hands, he pulled her in toward him and met her lips with his own. It was tentative and a little bit clumsy, and both their lips were wet with the snow. But she didn't pull away from him, and in that moment, he felt his heart bursting with a joy he hadn't known was possible. When they finally did pull apart from each other, she looked up at him, and there were tears in her eyes once again. Her lip trembled.

"Me too," she said, and the tears trailed down her cheeks, mixing with the snowflakes, but Severus knew that they were tears of joy.


	3. Paper Cups

**Author's Note**: Thank you to AnoGal for her lovely review. Even one review makes my day (nudge, wink). And thanks again to my very patient beta, aberrantstrain, who keeps reminding me to _insert adjective here. _For those that are wondering about the pace of updates, I think I will stick to around twice a week for now. How does that sound?

**Chapter 2: Paper Cups**

Severus stood beneath the shelter of an enormous old weathered Oak as the wind whistled through its naked branches. The tree — _their _tree — stood at the edge of the park in which Lily and Severus had first met. The park lay halfway between their homes — between the rows of red-brick terraced houses in the West and the semi-detached council houses with manicured gardens in the East. It had been their meeting spot ever since they were children, two unruly eight year olds gambolling about in its shade. In fact, this was the same tree that Severus had caught Petunia spying in, before accidentally snapping a branch of it off above her head. Severus had feared that day to be the end of their friendship, but here they now were, years later, still going strong. Better than strong, Severus mused, casting his mind back to Christmas…kissing amid the magicked flurries… It had finally snowed for real the day before, and the muddy downfall now crunched underneath his boots as he shifted from foot to foot, trying to get warm. The air was crisp, and he could see the outline of his breath hang in front of him as he exhaled.

"Is this any good?" Severus heard Lily's bright voice call from behind him, and he whirled around to see her holding a large bottle of sparkling wine in her mittened hand. She wore a white hip-length coat with white fur cuffs and collar. A wide fabric belt emphasized her slender waist. Atop her head she wore a matching white fur hat, her red hair flowing out from underneath it. She had on blue denims, and they were tucked neatly into brown suede boots. Brown suede mittens pulled together the outfit. Severus was not generally given over to women's fashions (or any fashions, really, as much as Lily prattled on to him about the latest trends), but something about how put together Lily looked really did it for him in that moment. He wanted to pick her up…shrink her, and put her in his pocket to carry around Cokeworth with him.

"Well?" she said. Severus realized that he had been staring at her with a dopey smile on his face. He quickly schooled his features into a neutral expression, clearing his throat to break the awkward silence. He reached to take the bottle from her hand, examining the label carefully. He didn't know much about wine, but he was pretty sure that any bottle with French on the label was a bottle that would be missed.

"Good?! Lily, do you have any idea how much this bottle is worth? I bet they've been saving it for a special occasion!"

"But…this is a special occasion. It's our first New Year's together. You know, _together_ together." She gave a nervous little giggle as she acknowledged out loud for the first time the changing nature of their relationship. It surprised him how good it felt to hear her say it.

"I agree it's a special occasion, but I doubt your parents will see it that way."

"Oh come on, Sev, don't you want to?" Her voice had taken on a different tone now. He had noticed it ever since their kiss on Christmas. If he didn't know better, he'd think she was flirting with him.

"Of course I want to drink your parents' very expensive champagne! I just don't want you to get into trouble, that's all."

"Se-_ev_." Again that whine that, to his intense mortification, he found endearing rather than irritating. It was her pout, with the ever so slight biting of her bottom lip that completely undid him. She was quickly learning exactly how to push his buttons. God help him…but he couldn't be arsed to care at this very moment.

"Alright, give it here then," he said, rolling his eyes. She handed him the bottle, beaming in a way that seemed to light up the entire snowy clearing. Yes, God help him, she had him wrapped around her little finger and she knew it too, the little minx! He placed the bottle against his hip and popped the cork. Evidently the bottle had been agitated on Lily's walk over here, for his arm was immediately drenched in a torrent of foam. Lily giggled uncontrollably at the sight and he scowled at her. She produced two paper cups from her bag, and he filled both before setting the bottle aside on a nearby moss-covered log, and taking a seat there himself. Lily joined him on the log, the bottle still fizzing slightly between them. "We're drinking champagne out of paper cups. This is so classy," he said with a smirk.

"Hey, it could be worse. We could be swigging it straight from the bottle!" She took an inglorious gulp, and Severus thought it blasphemy that they were drinking such a fine champagne in such an undignified manner. But Lily seemed to be having a grand old time, and ultimately that was all that mattered to him. They continued to drink in silence, sneaking glances at each other out of the corners of their eyes. An owl hooted off in the distance. It was a magnificent night, and the wildlife seemed to have come out to celebrate with them. At one point, Lily pointed excitedly at a grey squirrel, sloshing a bit of her drink onto her pristine coat as she bounced in her seat. She pouted adorably when she went to take another sip and realized there was none left. He poured them another two cups, and Lily made quick work of that too. It occurred to Severus that he had never seen her drunk before. Oh, she had indulged in some eggnog at Christmas, of course, and he had seen her have the standard red wine with dinner. But she wasn't much for the taste of alcohol, so she typically sipped those slowly, and he would sometimes catch her grimacing in a downright hilarious way at the strong taste. But the bubbles seemed to make it go down much easier for her. She had just finished her second cup, and now reached for the bottle, bringing it up to her lips, apparently having disposed with the nicety of the paper cups.

"Slow down, Lily," he said, grabbing the bottle out of her hand. "I don't want to have to carry you all the way home." She reached out for the bottle again, nearly toppling off the log in the process, but he held it out of her way.

"You can't get pissed off of champagne, Sev," she slurred. He raised an eyebrow, attempting to glower at her sternly, but the corners of his lips twitched upward despite himself, as they always seemed to do around Lily these days.

"Yeah, you can, and you're halfway there already," he gently admonished her, setting the bottle on the ground. "We should get you home." He stood in front of the log, holding his hands, chapped from the cold, out to her.

Lily took his hands, hauling herself to her feet before letting go. "Okay," she smiled cheekily at him, "but only if you agree to stay with me tonight."

Severus did not allow his jaw to drop, and instead reached inside his coat pocket for the pack of five _Park Drive_ cigarettes he had bought just the day before. He usually smoked _Player's No. 6_, but between Christmas shopping and saving for Lily's birthday present, he'd been a little scint. He lit one, then held the pack out to Lily. She shook her head. "Won't your parents have something to say about that?" he asked amid a puff of acrid smoke.

"They won't," she said, looking immensely pleased with herself.

Severus raised an eyebrow at her. "How's that?"

"They're at some posh party in London, tonight. Friend of a friend's or something like that. Petunia and I weren't invited."

"So they just left the two of you alone on New Year's? That doesn't sound like the Mr and Mrs Evans I know."

"We convinced them it was the perfect opportunity for us to bond as sisters," said Lily with a sly smile.

"And why," asked Severus, voice laced with suspicion, "would dear old Petunia go along with a thing like that?"

Lily grinned. "Oh, she's at her friend Linda's tonight. She's sweet on Linda's older brother but don't tell her I told you that."

He picked up the Champagne bottle and they started heading back to Lily's, their boots leaving footprints in the snow side by side. "I can't believe you managed to get the house to yourself on New Year's Eve. Where is this new cunning side of you coming from?"

"You're a bad influence, Severus Snape," she said lightly, filching the fag from between his fingers and taking a long drag. She didn't cough, and these fags weren't even filtered. Maybe he _was_ a bad influence on her. They walked the rest of the way to her house, passing the fag back and forth between them. Then again, maybe she was a bad influence on _him_.


	4. Girl with a Plan

**Author's Note:** Please leave a review so I know what you think. Even if it is just a few words. I know people are reading, but I don't know what they are thinking!

Thank you to my beta, aberrantstrain, who graciously lets me use her instead of a thesaurus.

**Chapter 3: Girl with a Plan**

They stumbled into Lily's room, and she flicked on the light. Lily's room was all white wood furniture with colourful teen girl accents. A large desk stood next to the door, although its surface was so littered with scraps of parchment that it was barely visible. A twin bed lay length wise against the wall opposite the door, the right hand wall acting as a headboard of sorts. The window overlooking the bed was adorned with a garishly patterned floral curtain. The bedside table held a lava lamp.

The opposite corner of the room was taken up entirely by an enormous, faux-fur beanbag chair in a frighteningly bright shade of fuchsia. Both Sev and Tuney hated that monstrosity of a thing with an equal passion, and that was the only reason that Lily refused to get rid of it. The all over effect of the room was one of violently clashing colours and patterns, and Lily couldn't love it more.

As much as she had insisted earlier that she couldn't possibly be drunk, Lily could feel the champagne hitting her hard, especially now that she was indoors without the cold wind whipping against her face to sober her up. But Lily could tell from Sev's heavy footfalls as he made his way over to her bed that he was feeling it too.

Gone were his customary grace and economy of movement, and he even flailed a bit as he climbed onto her bed. He reached for a back issue of _NME _that was lying haphazardly on her floor, overbalancing as he did so, and had to put his right arm out to avoid landing flat on his face. Lily stifled her giggle as he recovered, magazine triumphantly in hand, and sat himself horizontally upon the end of her bed, with his back against the wall and his legs crossed. He flipped idly through the mag as Lily took her place at the head of the bed, her legs stretched out before her. His hair was windswept, and his cheeks and hands were still ruddy from the cold. He was wearing classic blue denims, worn at the knees, and the black and gold _Led Zeppelin_ tee shirt that Lily had bought him the Christmas before last, when they saw the band in London on their '72 tour.

She bumped Sev's left knee with her right foot to get his attention. He remained engrossed in the album reviews, however, so she kicked him with her heel. Lightening fast, he grabbed her right foot in his left hand, while his right hand turned the page and his eyes stayed glued to the article. Sod it. Even slowed by the alcohol, his reflexes were still superhuman.

"Se-_ev_," Lily whined, in that way that she suspected Sev secretly liked. "Pay attention to me!" Lily tried to wrench her foot out of Sev's grip, but he held on tight.

"I'm listening to you," he replied, still refusing to spare her even the slightest glance.

"No! _Look_ at me." Lily was starting to get frustrated now, and she couldn't keep the hint of hurt out of her voice. She had been like this ever since she was a little girl, demanding Sev's undivided attention, and throwing a strop whenever she didn't get it. Severus picked up on her building frustration and flung the magazine aside with a sigh, finally turning his head to give her a mock glare.

"Fine, I'm looking at you. Happy?" he huffed in an annoyed tone, but it didn't have any bite to it. Lily was caught up for a moment in Sev's sloe-eyed gaze, and didn't answer. Suddenly, she felt something swoop queerly in her chest, and she became acutely aware of his hand gripping her foot.

Lily wasn't entirely sure how to proceed from here. Ever since Christmas Eve, she had been all out of sorts, careening wildly between sheer giddiness as she replayed their kiss in her mind and agonized anticipation of a repeat performance. Sev had spent Christmas Day with his mum and dad, but came over in the evening to watch _Top of the Pops_ on the telly with her and Tuney (ABBA was on with "Waterloo"). Lily had rested her hand next to his on the sofa, and though they were nearly touching, he never took her hand in his. This was entirely understandable of course, given that her parents and her sister had been in the room with them, too. But on Boxing Day, they had taken the bus into Manchester to catch the opening of _James Bond: Man with the Golden Gun._

They had shared a bag of popcorn and a bottle of Coca-cola between them, as was their custom, but even away from prying eyes in the dark theatre, Sev left her hand unmolested on the armrest between them. She tried hard to hide her disappointment after the film, but it must have bled through her shields, because Sev spent the bus ride back casting her anxious side-long glances while they rode in uneasy silence. They had spent the intervening days apart, and the uncertainty of their relationship status was slowly driving Lily 'round the twist.

After much rumination, she had hatched a plan involving Severus, a bottle of her parents' champagne, and an empty house, and here they now were. She was certainly feeling less inhibited than usual; she could only hope that Sev was feeling similarly bold. She looked over at him, sat all the way at the other end of the bed, head bowed low over that magazine once again, hair shutting out the world around him.

Perhaps it was time to take matters into her own hands. After all, Sev had made the first move, maybe it was on her to make the second?

She snuggled under the duvet, leaning back against the far wall, then flipped back the duvet in invitation. Lily's house, unlike Spinner's End, had central heating, but it was still cold in the room. She kicked him again to get his attention. Severus hesitated momentarily, but Lily smiled in triumph when he clambered over, gratefully pulling the duvet over them both. They sat side by side in awkward silence, neither seeming to know what to do or say. Lily became keenly aware of the weight of Severus' leg against her own.

Just as the tension started to become unbearable, he yawned wide. "I'm dead knackered."

"Me too," she said, catching his yawn with relief.

When Lily made to get out of bed a moment later, Severus lay a questioning hand on her arm.

"The light," Lily explained, "I forgot to get it."

Severus rolled his eyes. "Come on Lily, you hardly need a wand to get the light." Lily closed her eyes in concentration, repeating _Nox…Nox…Nox…_ in her head. The light fixture overhead flickered momentarily, but the room remained as bright as before. She smiled sheepishly at Severus, "Some of us still rely on all that foolish wand waving, you know."

Severus snapped the fingers of his left hand, and both the overhead light and the lava lamp immediately went out, the only illumination now coming from the street lamps outside.

"Show off," she whispered in his ear, and was surprised at how breathy her voice sounded. They snuggled down further under the covers, he on his back and she on her tummy, face and legs turned toward him. She took up most of the bed, so that he was nearly squashed between her and the wall. Sev smelled of sweat and smoke and nothing so much as _boy_.

They were not quite touching, but she could feel him warming the air next to her in bed, like a living radiator. It was surprising how hot he always was to the touch, although he always complained of being cold, particularly after a meal. Perhaps he gave off so much heat to his surroundings that there was never any left to keep himself warm.

They used to sleep together like this, every night. That was before Hogwarts, when Sev would climb in through Lily's window and stay until dawn broke through the early morning mists. It started because eight year old Lily was afraid of the dark, and it went on because after a year of co-sleeping, neither of them could fall asleep without the other beside them. Hogwarts had been a rough transition, of course. Lily had cried herself to sleep every night the first week there, not because she missed Tuney or mum and dad, but because she felt Sev's nightly absence in her bed like an acute stomachache. They went home for Christmas three months later, and that first night back in Cokeworth, Lily waited up for Sev until sunrise, shivering with her window cracked open for him, but he never came.

When she had confronted him in tears the next morning, he had blushed beet red and mumbled something about these new dreams he was having. Lily had dropped the issue, assuming he was having night terrors and that being a typical boy, he was needlessly but steadfastly embarrassed about it. This would be their first time sleeping in the same bed together since they were eleven.

She tossed and turned but her mind wouldn't quiet down. Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the fact that it was New Year's Eve, but something inside her wanted to bring things to a head. She wanted Something between them to happen tonight.

"Sev?" she whispered in the dark. "Why did you kiss me?" He was silent for a long moment. Had he fallen asleep already?

Then, his voice, so quiet that she could barely make it out: "I think you know why."

"Is it because…Sev, do you fancy me?" she held her breath, her heart pounding a staccato against her ribcage as the silence stretched between them.

"…Yeah," he admitted, finally. She heard him draw in a deep breath, as if gathering up his courage, before he asked, "What about you?"

"I— I like you too," she admitted.

"You like me as a friend? Or as more than a friend?" She could just make out his eyes; the slate grey irises smoldering black in the low light from the window.

"More than a friend," she said, and he rewarded her with a radiant smile, the likes of which she hadn't seen on Sev's face since before Hogwarts.

Finally admitting their feelings to each other out loud filled Lily with a warm glow of contentment. No longer would they need to tiptoe around one another. It was out in the open at last! But why hadn't he kissed her since Christmas? They were in bed together, faces inches apart, and yet he still hadn't made a move to close the distance between them. It made her uneasy. She didn't have the courage to meet his lips with her own, so instead she shimmied a bit closer to him and flung her left arm over his chest. If Sev was surprised, he didn't show it. After all, they used to cuddle like this all the time, but that had gone the way of the shared bed, unfortunately.

They were still remarkably physically affectionate with each other: she would walk down the halls of Hogwarts clinging onto his arm, and he was often seen giving her an impromptu neck message in the courtyard during break. It was a source of much rumour and teasing at school. Their parents were used to the unusual closeness: they accepted it as a matter of fact. Lily's parents even referred to them as if they were a single unit. Ever since they were eight years old, it was _SevandLily_ this and _SevandLily_ that, and even Tuney didn't bat an eye at that anymore.

Lily was amazed at how different cuddling together felt now that they were older. Whereas before it was comforting and mindless in its familiarity, tonight she was hyper aware of every point where their bodies met, every subtle sound and movement from Severus, and her stomach flip flopped pleasantly. But Sev had turned his head back toward the ceiling, and it seemed as if he would go to sleep without giving her so much as a peck on the forehead. Her stomach dropped as the disappointment washed over her.

"Could you kiss me again?" she blurted, before she could stop herself. Thankfully he wouldn't be able to make out the red tinting her cheeks. She felt him tense in her arms, but just as she had resigned herself to rejection, she felt his hand lifting her chin before he brushed his lips to hers momentarily.

"How was that?" he asked after he pulled back.

"It was nice. Can we try it again, but with tongue?"

Lily had never French kissed before, and she was sure that she was Sev's first kiss, so that meant that he mustn't have either. As Severus's lips descended on hers once again, Lily quietly thanked her subscription to _Cosmo_. What was she supposed to do again? She felt Severus's tongue swipe hesitantly at her bottom lip. Oh, right. She parted her lips and brushed the underside of his tongue with the tip of hers, then somewhat clumsily sucked it into her mouth. It was wet and felt a bit peculiar, but Sev seemed to like it, going by his low groan. She repeated the motion a few times, before switching and exploring his mouth. Severus's hand was clutching her shoulder hard enough to bruise and she swore she heard him whimper. For her part, however, Lily didn't get what all the fuss was about. It wasn't unpleasant, but it wasn't exactly pleasurable either. But she felt herself getting aroused from Severus's reaction all the same.

After several more minutes of kissing, however, Lily started to feel a bit nauseated and pulled back, resting her head on Sev's shoulder. He was breathing hard, and she could feel the rise and fall of his chest and the hammer of his heart beneath her hand.

"Sev?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm really glad you're here."

"Me too." He pressed a kiss to the side of her forehead, and wound his left arm around her waist. They stayed that way until Lily felt herself drifting off to sleep, utterly content in his arms.


	5. Carnal Knowledge

**Author's Note**: Ok folks, this chapter earns its M rating. So if that makes you uncomfortable, please skip it. Also, please review. I feel I took a bit of a risk with this chapter, and I am a bit nervous about its reception. If you don't review, I will assume I scared you off!

Thank you to yobadself for reviewing the last chapter!

**Chapter 4: Carnal Knowledge**

"Sev? _Sev?_" Lily gently shook him awake. From the clock that she could barely make out in the dim light filtering through the curtains, she knew that they had been asleep for a couple of hours at most, and it was now officially the start of 1975. As much as Lily loved to have Sev beside her in bed once more, each of them took up more room than they did as eleven year olds, and her twin bed was quite cramped with the both of them in it. She had tried to fall back asleep, but had given up, tuning in to the sounds of his slumber instead, when a thought suddenly occurred to her. Didn't boys get erections when they slept? She darted her eyes down Sev's body, but couldn't make see anything more than vague shadows. She immediately berated herself for even looking, but her own naughtiness also made her skin tingle. "Sev!"

He stirred awake, eyelids lazily drifting open. "Yeah?" His voice was husky with sleep and the sound of it made somethingheavy pool low in her pelvis.

"Do you ever think about me?" she asked,sliding her bare feet beneath the cuffs of his denims so that she could warm her frigid toes against the hairy skin of his calves. He still wore his socks, and they felt threadbare and scratchy against her heels.

"Of course. All the time," he murmured back, and she could feel the weight of his unblinking gaze upon her.

Maybe it was the lack of sleep, the alcohol still in her system, or the fact that everything felt slightly surreal in the dead of night, but Lily found herself possessed with an uncharacteristic boldness. "No, I mean. Do you ever think about me when you're, you know, _wanking_?" Her voice lowered down to a hushed whisper on the last word.

"Yeah. All the time," he breathed, and Lily's stomach flipped with a sudden rush of nervous arousal. "Does that bother you?"

"No. I like that you think about me," she admitted, and she heard Sev's breath catch in his throat. She screwed up all her daring and forced the next words out past numb lips. "What kinds of things do you think about doing with me?"

She felt Severus slip in at the edge of her mind, and images of them together began to flash before her eyes. She blushed as she realized she was seeing Sev's fantasies…the very things he thought about while he stroked himself late at night in the privacy of his own bed.

But as thrilling as it was to see the proof of his fantasies in her mind's eye, what she really yearned for in that moment was the deep huskiness of his voice in her ear as he described in detail everything that he wished he could do to her. She let her eyes fall shut, raising her mental shields, and just before she pushed him out, she caught a glimpse of his panic. She read his fear that he had overstepped his boundaries, gone too far and scandalized her. Well, she would just have to set him at ease.

She scooted closer to him, laying a hand on his bony chest as she lowered her lips to the delicate shell of his ear. "No, don't show me. Tell me. I want to hear you say the words."

Sev aligned his face with hers, until they were practically nose to nose, and spoke slowly, his voice thick with something Lily couldn't quite identify. "I think about holding you and kissing you and running my fingers through your hair."

"And?"

"And kissing your neck."

"And?"

"And your ear." His eyes swept down her face, settling on her lips. "I think about you sucking on my earlobe."

"Like this?" She nudged his head to the side with her cheek, exposing his left ear, then ran the tip of her tongue once around the lobe, before gently pulling it into her mouth. She nibbled on it gingerly, andfelt him shiver despite the warm cocoon of the thick duvet.

Sev brought his right hand up, clutching Lily's own hand in his where it still lay on his chest. "Yeah, just like that."

She pulled back, releasing his ear with a soft _pop_. "What else do you think about?"

"I think about your tits," he said, then ducked his head sheepishly. "Sorry."

She nuzzled his down turned face. "No, it's okay. Tell me. I want to hear you say it."

"I think about touching them, playing with them."

"With your hands?" she prompted.

"And my mouth…on your tits. Would you like that?" They were both breathing hard now, practically panting in the still of the night.

"Yeah…want you to…play with them. Do you want to touch me down there?"

"God yeah, so badly, ye haff no idea…wan' ter taste yer…there. Be' yer'd taste sweet a' honey," he said, voice roughened and ending on a lilt.

Sev's speech was a chameleon-like mish mash of various accents and dialects. When school was in session, it took on the precise, clipped tones of Received Pronunciation to match his peers. But, back in Cokeworth for the holidays, it inevitably receded back to its broad Mancunian roots. (As did Lily's, the more time she spent at home with only Severus for company.) But when Sev was drunk (or aroused, as it was turning out), his accent regressed even further, adopting his ma and da's Northern Irish lilt, with the odd bit of pikey1 slang thrown in here and there, a stubborn remnant of his traveller roots. If Tuney heard him like this, she'd say that he sounded like the tinker trash1 that he was. Lily thought he sounded exactly like the type of boy who could talk his way into a nice Anglican girl's bed while her parents were out of town.

"More tangy like, actually," she replied with a giggle, deciding to tease him just a little. Well, maybe not such a nice girl anymore, as it turned out.

"You've tasted yourself?" he asked incredulously.

"I — I was curious."

"Oh god," he moaned. "That's dead sexy."

"Here have a taste right now." Lily disentangled her left hand from his right, and reached down, slipping her fingers down the front of her denims and into the slick wetness pooling in the crotch of her knickers. She hastily pulled them back out, accidentally on purpose brushing her clitoris as she did so. Then, before she could think better of it, she brought the tips of her fingers to Sev's chapped lips. He sniffed cautiously at them, and darted out the very tip of his tongue, curling it around the end of her fingers for a quick taste. The feel of his wet tongue wrapping around her fingers was indescribably erotic.

"You're right," he said, a slow smile turning his lips, "it _is_ tangy."

"What about you, Sev, have you ever tasted yourself?"

He hesitated. "No."

"Not ever? Not even once, just to see?" she wheedled.

"…Maybe once," he admitted, and she could hear the blush in his voice. Lily didn't know why, but the thought of him tasting his own spunk oddly thrilled her.

"How was it?"

"Um…kind of bitter. Definitely nowhere near as good as _you_ taste," he said with a sexy chuckle.

"How often do you wank, Sev?"

"Um I dunno…the normal amount, I guess."

She giggled. "What's the 'normal amount'?"

"Lily…"

"Please Sev. Don't be embarrassed. I won't make fun, I promise."

"Why d'you want to know?" he asked suspiciously.

"Because…I like to think about you touching yourself."

She wasn't lying. Ever since her first year at Hogwarts, when she had learnt from furtive conversations with her friends just what it was that boys got up to, Lily couldn't help wondering about it. She sometimes found herself fantasizing during History of Magic about Sev taking himself in hand…or about taking him in her mouth…imagining the way his head might fall back to expose the pale column of his neck as he came undone…

He interrupted her feverish musings. "You do? Wait, you mean you've actually thought about it?"

She returned her left hand to his chest, stroking idly over the rough cotton of his tee shirt. "Yeah, I think about it a lot. I want to watch you do it sometime."

"What else do you think about, Lily?" he asked, voice dropping an octave.

It was her turn now to paint a picture for him with her words. She opened her mouth to speak, but suddenly her throat went dry. She desperately racked her brain for something to say…anything that would sound sexy and not stupid out loud, but found herself tongue-tied. To buy herself a few more minutes, she brushed her lips against the side of his neck. He moaned wantonly, and the sound of it was enough to inspire her.

She continued her exploration of his neck, pressing an open mouthed kiss just below his ear. "I think about you licking me down there, your head between my thighs" — _kiss_ — "your fingers inside me" — _nip_ — "getting me ready…"

"Ready for" — _pant_ — "what?"

She darted another kiss to the rim of his ear, before pulling back to look him directly in the eye. "Ready for you."

"You want me inside of you, Lily?"

"Unnngh, yeah. I want — I want to feel you…everywhere." She trailed her fingers down to his waist, and slipped her fingers beneath his shirt, caressing his hip. His skin was flushed with heat and clammy. You think about having sex?"

He raised his hand to clutch at her wrist once again. "Yeah…loads…"

"How do you want to… _f-fuck me_?" she stuttered the last two words, feeling shy and incredibly wicked at the same time.

Hearing that word fall from her lips fired Sev up, and his voice came out in a low growl that made her desire swollen flesh pulse with need. "I want to fuck you face to face so I can see your eyes. I wanna watch your face as I make you come."

She trailed her fingertips lightly over his upper abdomen, feeling the lean muscles there ripple beneath the pads of her fingers. "I wanna see you come too. What other positions?"

"You on top. I want to suck on your tits while you ride me."

She whimpered. It was so hot, knowing he thought about such filthy things…and hearing those — those _words —_ drop from his lips in that wicked voice full of such dark promise…

"Go on…" she whispered on a sigh, burning to hear more.

"I want to bend you over that desk right there and fuck you from behind with my hand in your hair."

She mewled wordlessly, pressing her thighs together in a fruitless attempt to relieve the pressure, but the friction only made her throb harder for him.

"Lily, I want to ask you a question, but you don't have to answer if you don't want to, okay?"

"Go ahead."

"Do you ever touch yourself?"

She froze, mind hung up on the sure knowledge that _nice girls don't do that. _Or, at the very least, they don't _admit_ to doing it.

"Lily? I won't think any less of you for it. I promise."

She forced herself to relax. Of course he wouldn't. This was _Sev_, and she knew from his numerous rants against the Victorian ideals of Wizarding Society that he was the last person on Earth to care what it was that nice girls did, or didn't do.

"Yeah, I do." It felt strangely liberating to just admit to it.

"How?"

"I rub myself with my fingers." Her fingers swirled around his belly button, imitating the motion for him.

He groaned, shifting his grip up her wrist so that she could move her hand freely. "And, when you feel that ache deep inside, what do you do then?"

"I use my fingers to try to fill it up. Sometimes I —" she paused, suddenly bashful.

"Go on." He was gripping her forearm so tightly now that it hurt, kneading the flesh in his mindless fervor.

She rubbed at the coarse hairs that ran a trail from his navel down past the loose waistband of his denims. "Sometimes I use — use m-my hairbrush and pretend it's the real thing."

Time seemed to freeze for a moment as Lily was nearly drowned in her mortification.

"Lily?"

She had turned away from Sev and buried her flaming face in her pillow. "Oh god, I don't know why I told you that. Why did I tell you that?"

"What's the matter?" asked Sev, laying a concerned hand on her arm and trying to turn her back around to face him. She resisted, praying for her bed to swallow her up. How could she ever look him in the face again after what she had just told him?

"I'm so embarrassed!" she whimpered, near tears.

"You have nothing to be embarrassed about! That's the sexiest thing I've —"

"How is that sexy?" she asked despairingly, finally turning back around.

"Because — the idea of you — that you want it so much that you would —" he drew in a sharp breath, his left hand pinching her waist so hard she wouldn't be surprised to find bruises in the morning. "God, Lily, you don't know what you do to me…" Encouraged by his words and the fevered desperation with which he still gripped her waist, she returned to tracing up and down his abdomen with her left hand, fingernails just barely grazing the goose-pimpled skin.

Suddenly, a thought struck her, piercing through the fog of arousal in her head. _Was he…right now?_

She shifted her thigh against his pelvis, feeling around for it, but she couldn't tell. "Are you turned on right now?"

"Yeah."

"Does that mean that you're — that you're — hard?" She held her breath in anticipation.

"…Yeah. Really hard."

She exhaled harshly as she felt herself start to throb between her legs. Knowing he was hard right now…hard for _her. _Her hand drifted lower, dipping beneath the waistband of his loose denims, and with her eyes closed, she imagined what his cock looked like right now…rigid and swollen…ready for her _right now_. She wanted so badly to inch her hand further down, slip it down inside his pants and grip him tightly. She wanted to know what he felt like in the palm of her hand…how long he was, how thick. She couldn't help her intense curiosity.

Her fingers brushed the elastic of his underpants, but at the last minute, she pulled back, suddenly nervous.

"What about you?" he asked. "Are you turned on?"

"Yeah."

"What does it feel like for a girl? You know, being — aroused?"

She shut her eyes and described exactly what she was feeling in that moment. "It feels like your — your fanny is throbbing, and you want to squeeze your legs together or rub between them. And deep inside it feels empty and there's this sort of achy feeling and it's like you want something to fill you up, to go deep inside to reach that ache —"

But before she could finish, Severus suddenly guided her left hand, which had been resting on his lower abdomen, down…down…her fingers just brushed something hard through the thick fabric of his denims, when she suddenly yanked her hand back, her heart hammering in her chest.

He let go of her as she'd scalded him, turning away from her and onto his stomach. "S-sorry. I shouldn't have gotten carried away." Watching his back rise and fall as he tried to get his ragged breath under control, she suddenly felt bad.

"No Sev, it's not that. I want to — believe me, I do — just not yet. I want to save something for later. If we do it all now, we'll have nothing new to look forward to. And eventually things will get…boring."

He chuckled. "Lily, there are enough things we can explore to last us a lifetime, trust me," he said, and she was reminded that Sev was a _boy_ and of course he knew about things that they could do to each other that had never even occurred to her…things that he had probably heard about from the older boys in his house…things that he had read about in dirty magazines. It felt both wrong and incredibly hot to think of him, her best friend since childhood, looking at pornography. She felt hopelessly naive, while at the same time it turned her on that Sev was definitely _not._ His amused voice shook her out of her fevered thoughts. "Besides, sex could never be boring with you, Lily."

'pikey' and 'tinker' are both somewhat derogatory terms for Irish travelers.

**Author's Note 2:** This chapter closely follows my first ever experience with the opposite sex. Except, in my case, I had never kissed a boy, and still didn't until nearly a year later. Thank you to my beta, aberrantstrain, for not making fun of me when I told her that!

Please review. I am particularly interested to know what people think of this chapter.


	6. Love at First Sense

**Author's Note:** Thank you to my beta, aberrantstrain, for making me describe the Evans kitchen. For those who are interested, I posted a photo of it along with a newspaper clipping on AO3.

Also thank you to yobadself for reviewing again! And thanks to those who have added this story to their alerts. It means a lot to know this story isn't just going into the ether!

**Chapter 5: Love at First Sense**

When they awoke the next morning, finally sober, Lily was flooded with embarrassment over her decidedly uninhibited behaviour of the night before. She buried her face into her pillow, too ashamed to even look at Severus. God, he'd never want her to be his girlfriend, now that he knew what a tart she was. But if Sev remembered that thing about the hairbrush, he made no mention of it. In fact, he was perfectly sweet, spooning her while he whispered nervous apologies for taking things too far. Nevertheless, Lily had remained mortified, particularly once she had to face Sev in the revealing brightness of the early morning sun glaring through the kitchen windows as they gingerly nibbled on toast and tea (the only thing their roiling stomachs could handle).

Now, three days later, the awkwardness had mostly receded, Lily having nearly convinced herself that Sev must have been too drunk to remember the most sordid of her confessions. In fact, when Sev came over for tea that Saturday, Lily was relieved by how _normal_ it felt listening to Sev and Tuney sniping back and forth at each other over the kitchen table while she played reluctant mediator, and her parents smiled on indulgently, only half listening in.

The subject of today's altercation was censorship: the whole family had tuned into the live radio broadcast of the Greater London Council's debate on film censorship (1). Enid Wistrich, the chairwoman of the council's film viewing board, had argued passionately against the current practice of censoring films for obscene content even for viewers over the age of 18. The heated debate had finally wrapped up four hours later in favour of famed housewife and moral crusader Mary Whitehouse by a margin of six votes; Westrich had vowed to resign.

Petunia, of course, had found in Mary Whitehouse her new idol, and was gloating over the outcome, while Sev disparaged the seventeen Labour councilors who had voted against abolishing film censorship, declaring them to be 'nothing but puritan traitors'. Lily's father sided with Severus, judging him a 'spirited young lad,' while her mother dutifully disappeared to do the washing up, exemplifying her generation's dogma that it was not the place of a working class housewife to mix herself up in the business of politics.

Eventually, Lily's mum and dad retired to the sitting room, leaving the kids to bicker on in the kitchen — a newly renovated avocado and mustard yellow masterpiece of modern design.

Severus still had his hackles up, and as soon as the opening strains of _Coronation Street_ could be heard coming from the telly, he started back in on Petunia, this time in earnest. "I say, fuck censorship! And fuck Mary Whitehouse, too! God knows she needs it."

"Sev!" Lily admonished him.

Severus turned to her, face etched with disbelief and a hint of betrayal. "What? You disagree? You want some stupid stuffed shirts deciding which films fully grown adults are entitled to see in this country?"

"No, I agree with your sentiments regarding censorship, but I would appreciate it if you didn't phrase them in such a way as to sexually objectify the woman whose opinions you are criticizing," Lily countered loftily.

"What? Who'd want to sexually objectify _Mary Whitehouse_?" Sev's face twisted in disgust. "I wouldn't even objectify her with some other bloke's prick."

Lily rolled her eyes and spoke over Petunia's affronted gasp at Sev's vulgar rejoinder. Count on Tuney to completely miss the point and take offence for all the wrong reasons. "But don't you _see_, Sev? By implying that she's sexually undesirable, you _are_ sexually objectifying her, because the validity of her argument has nothing to do with her sexual desirability, or lack thereof. If Mary Whitehouse were a man, you wouldn't be attacking his opinion by calling him ugly or saying that he's in need of a good lay, now would you?"

Sev had the good grace to look ashamed, while Petunia still hadn't moved past clutching her metaphorical pearls. "Fine, I concede your point," he muttered.

Petunia's expression had slowly turned to triumph following Lily's rebuke, and she took the opening. "Yeah, Severus. Don't be so _sexist_," she crowed gleefully.

Severus sneered superciliously at her. "Oh please, Tuney, don't pretend you know anything about feminism, you'll only hurt yourself."

"How dare you!" shrilled Petunia, as Lily suppressed the urge to giggle.

"Sorry Tunes, he's right. If you can name _one_ feminist source of reading material, I'll eat my owl. You don't even have to have read it. And no, _Cosmo _doesn't count," she continued, anticipating Petunia before she even had a chance to respond, "as much as Helen Gurley Brown (2) may fancy herself that it does." Petunia snapped her mouth shut at that and scowled.

* * *

Saturday night found Severus lying in bed by himself at Spinner's End, having just had a spectacular wank. With the events of Near Year's Eve to occupy his fantasies, he didn't even bother breaking out the worn copies of _Penthouse_ (3) anymore. Lily's breathy voice whispering in his ear about all the naughty things she wanted him to do to her…all the naughty things she did to _herself_… Ohhh God. She was loads better to wank to than the tarts in any top shelf mag. Severus felt his cock start to stir again, and turned over onto his stomach, willing it to go back down. If he kept going at this rate, he was going to need to brew himself some industrial grade chafing ointment.

He still couldn't believe how far they had gone. Oh, physically, they hadn't done much more than a bit of snogging and some funny arm groping. He had gotten a bit carried away there at the end and pulled her hand onto his pecker. He cringed once again, thinking of how he had nearly frightened her off. She had tried to reassure him — giving him some line about having things to look forward to later on — to make him feel less like a bloody perv, bless the girl. But despite the fact that he hadn't even copped a feel of her lovely tits, he still felt like he had walked away that morning with a profound new knowledge of Lily Evans — a _carnal _knowledge. He knew what she tasted like when she was aroused (even if he hadn't _directly_ tasted her…it still bloody well counted). He knew for a fact that she frigged herself. Hell, he knew that she did it with her _hairbrush_. He bit his lip and ground his cock into the mattress. This train of thought certainly wasn't helping matters any, just as it hadn't the previous three nights since ringing in the New Year.

The Express was leaving in the morning, and Severus would be getting a lift to King's Cross with Lily and her parents, since his own family didn't own a car. His da had offered to drive, as he always did, happy to have an opportunity to rope Severus into helping him lift a car from the Church car park for the day. His mam was quick on the uptake though, having lived with Tobias through many years and multiple stints in the clink, and she hadn't been best pleased with the plan. So the Evanses it was, as per usual.

He couldn't wait to see in Lily in the morning. He had spent the day with her, of course, but he missed her already. He was starting to realize just how pathetic being in love made a bloke. He had thought that having his feelings reciprocated would make it easier, but so far it had only seemed to make him _more_ obsessed with her.

Severus had not fallen in love with Lily at first sight. No, that was impossible, because in actual fact, he had fallen in love with her before he ever glimpsed her coppery hair and verdant eyes. Casting his mind back to that day six and a half years ago, he recalled the moment when he had first sensed her, that gentle caress of her consciousness against his own. The tendrils of her emotions had reached out to him, warming him like the sun's golden rays. Her mind had been so vibrant. So _vital_.

At the time, Severus had not known that he was a legilimens. Indeed, he had not known anything about mind magic at all. But that day he had sensed the first living mind apart from his mam's, and he had known that the person to whom this mind belonged must be like them — _special_. It was only later, when he witnessed the owner of said mind flying from the swings in the playground that he connected the dots and realized that consciousness must be a property of possessing magic. From that, his eight year old self had concluded (incorrectly, of course) that muggles, with their quiet, empty minds, must necessarily lack consciousness, going through life like astonishingly complex automatons. It had made him sad for his da — what must it be like to go through life lacking the cerebral richness of an inner world?

Looking back on it now, it half amused and half horrified him to see how misguided he had been in his childhood conclusions. He hadn't meant anything sinister by it at the time, but he could appreciate how the concept of muggles as mindless automatons could be very dangerous indeed. (That was how the Ministry regarded them, anyway, with their indiscriminate use of memory charms, Severus insisted in his more cynical moments).

But Lily was possessed with a mental landscape as rich as any he had ever encountered apart from his own. What had stumped him initially was why she couldn't sense _him._ After all, he and his mam could sense each other, and Lily was a witch. Shouldn't she be able to read his thoughts, his feelings, as he could do with her? When he had talked it over with Lily, her beautiful green eyes had filled with tears, and her voice quavering, she had wondered whether that meant that she wasn't fully magical after all. That maybe it _did_ make a difference that her parents were Muggles. He hadn't brought it up again, unwilling to upset her. Not until they arrived at Hogwarts 3 years later. For the first time, they were surrounded by other magical people, and things started to fall into place.

Lily had found him after the Welcome feast rocking back and forth in a broom cupboard, hands over his ears, recovering from the mental cacophony that the unfiltered thoughts of hundreds of students had wrought on his unshielded mind. Lily had been distraught at being separated into a different house, and so they had curled up together and settled in for the night in that musty old broom cupboard, using their school robes as makeshift blankets. That's where Filch had found them in the early hours of the morning, and when they had been brought before the Headmaster and their Heads of House, Severus had noticed a most peculiar thing — Dumbledore's mind was quiet, like his da's, while McGonagall's and Slughorn's were not.

Then, the next evening in the Slytherin common room, he had noticed that head girl Bellatrix Black's mind was similarly silent, and in desperation, he had pulled her aside and asked her about it. Her eyes had immediately widened in excitement, and she had explained everything — how he was a legilimens, just like her, just like Dumbledore. How a legilimens would go mad if they didn't learn to control their gift and close their mind to stray thoughts and feelings. How some legilimenses had left the Wizarding world behind altogether to get some peace and quiet, since muggles lacked the magic to project their thoughts and feelings (not mindless automatons after all).

It had been Bellatrix who had taught him to close his mind, and he, in turn, had taught Lily. Bellatrix herself had been trained over the course of a summer by a friend of the family who came over from the Continent for the task when Bellatrix had a mental breakdown and had to be hospitalized briefly in St. Mungos (4). His own mother's behaviour — leaving the Wizarding World behind to marry a muggle, her life long struggle with insanity — started to make sense for the first time. But why hadn't _she_ taught him occlumency? Why hadn't she given him the books that Bellatrix loaned him from the Black family library. Books that had helped him to hone his rough passive legilimency into a practised, intent-driven magical art whereby he could purposely enter Lily's mind and they could exchange images at will.

Learning occlumency had allowed Severus to tune down the noise and go about his day. Of course, keeping his shields up 16 hours a day, 7 days a week was enormously draining and when Lily had realized this, she had begged him to teach her occlumency. Now, when it was just the two of them, he could relax his shields, since she often took over the burden of occluding so that he didn't have to, giving him a much needed respite.

That was one of the main reasons he loved staying in Cokeworth over the holidays. Returning to the castle was always a bit of a shock to his system, the adjustment even more difficult after a long, lazy summer with a relaxed, open mind. And then there was Potter and Black and all their shit to deal with.

But when they returned to Hogwarts tomorrow, everything would be different. Because this time around, Lily Evans, Gryffindor Princess, would be his — Severus Snape's — girlfriend. And everyone would know it.

* * *

1 – This was a real broadcasted debate, although it took place on January 28, not January 4.

2 – Helen Gurley Brown was actually the editor of Cosmopolitan U.S. in the 1970s, not Cosmo UK. However, she is rather notorious for fancying herself a feminist, and coming under fire for doing so.

3 – Penthouse was one of 3 popular soft-porn mags in Britain in the 70s. The other two were Mayfair and Men's Own. I picked Penthouse for Sev, because it was the first to show pubic hair, and also it had more serious, hard-hitting journalism than the other two.

4 – Can anyone guess who this 'family friend' was?


	7. Girl Talk vs Boy Talk

**Author's Note:** Thanks to my beta,** aberrantstrain**, as always, for her words of encouragement. Thanks to **yobadself **and **Guest** for reviewing the last chapter. Please review! Unless any of you feel strongly otherwise, I may go to updating every week instead of twice a week. I'm thinking every Tuesday from now on, but I'll see.

Also, I am cross-posting this to AOx3 with supplementary info and multimedia for each chapter. There is also a fairly in-depth discussion of class structure in 1970s UK in the comments. Check it out if you are interested!

**Chapter 6: Girl Talk vs. Boy Talk**

It was the first night back at Hogwarts, and up in Gryffindor tower, Lily sat cross legged opposite Mary MacDonald (1) on Mary's four-poster bed. Marlene Moody (2), Charlotte McKinnon and Diana Fawley were still downstairs, playing exploding snap with the boys. Mary had just finished breathlessly recounting her holiday to Paris, and now it was Lily's turn to yammer on endlessly as only teenage girls can do.

"You have to tell me everything! But please, Lily, for once in your life, spare me the play by play of the _Sev and Lily show_."

Lily's face fell.

Mary noticed the change. "What?"

"It's just…we — I — he — sort of…kissed me," Lily mumbled to the floor, dreading Mary's reaction to the news.

Mary didn't disappoint her. "You what?" she screeched. "Did you kiss him back?"

Lily nodded, her heart pounding wildly in her chest. Mary didn't exactly approve of Sev, or of Lily's friendship with him. Lily knew this because Mary was crap at keeping her thoughts to herself. As in, she had a big mouth. Sure enough, Lily cringed as Mary opened said big mouth and began to speak.

"I don't even know why you hang around with him. What do you see in him anyway? You know what Sirius says? He says Snape is up to his eyeballs in the Dark Arts, always has been…knew more curses as a first year than all the seventh years combined…"

Lily leaped up from the bed, fists clenched at her sides so tight that she could feel her nails digging into her palms. "Sev's not like that! He just reads a lot, that's all. He doesn't go around hexing people for fun, which is more than I can say for Sirius Black. And anyway, there's no such thing as dark magic, that's just a term the Ministry made up for any kind of magic that they up and decide should be illegal or controlled…"

Mary leaped to her feet as well, taking a step toward Lily with her hands on her hips. "Is that what _he_ told you?"

Lily opened her mouth, ready to get into it proper with Mary, then shut it again, her gaze drifting to the far wall. What could she say? After all, Sev had, in fact, been the one to tell her that.

"You're always defending him, Lily…if he was really as good as you make him out to be, you wouldn't need to defend him all the time, would you?"

Tears sprang to Lily's eyes, unbidden. "You don't understand Mary! Sev made me _special_. I owe everything I am to him."

"What do you mean?"

Mary sounded genuinely curious, so Lily wiped her eyes and tried, for the first time, to explain in earnest to her friend the entirety of what Sev meant to her.

"He's the one who told me that I was a witch. He — he had seen me doing magic. I was eight years old. I was playing in the park with my sister when all of a sudden this boy comes up to me and tells me that I'm special, that I'm a witch. That I can do magic just like him. He…he _discovered_ me. I was _nothing_ before Sev came into my life."

Mary sat back on her bed and looked up at Lily with a sympathetic sort of confusion in her eyes. "Lily, I get that he means a lot to you, but…he just told you that you were a witch…he didn't make you _into_ a witch. He didn't give you your magic. You were born with that. You still would have come to Hogwarts if you had never met him."

Lily paced back and forth in front of Mary's bed in agitation, swiping at her eyes. "I know that! But for the first time in my life, I _felt _special. He did that. He told me that I was special." Mary continued to look up at her in bemusement, and Lily huffed a frustrated breath. How could she possibly make her understand? "You don't know what it's like, growing up in Cokeworth. It's where magic goes to _die_. It's a hell hole and everyone just wants to bloody well get out of there but nobody ever does. Sev showed me a whole new world beyond Cokeworth. He make me believe that I would leave there one day. He gave me hope," Lily finished with a sniffle.

"Oh Lily…" Mary patted the space beside her. "Come sit down and tell me all about it, then. How did he kiss you?"

Lily joined her friend on the bed, her lips tugging into a weak smile. She had been bursting with excitement over Sev, and was so glad to have someone to confide in about him.

"Well…he was over at my house on Christmas Eve, and we were out alone in the yard…" She trailed off, suddenly bashful.

"Go on."

"I was complaining about how we didn't have a White Christmas this year. So, he told me to close my eyes and made it snow."

"He made it snow?"

"Yeah…wandless magic. You don't know him Mary, he really is brilliant," she said at her friend's incredulous look.

"Okay…what next? Get to the kissing part," Mary said excitedly, her dislike for Sev apparently forgotten in the quest for teenage gossip.

"I looked up and saw a shooting star, and I told Sev to make a wish. And then I asked him what he wished for."

"Lily! You can't ask people what they wished for! Then it won't happen. Everyone knows that."

"Yeah, but this time it did," said Lily with a dreamy smile.

"What do you mean?"

"When I asked him what he wished for, he pulled me close and kissed me, right there under the stars, and he answered 'this.'"

Mary sighed dreamily, leaning back onto her elbows. "That's so romantic. Who knew Snape had it in him? It's like something out of a Hollywood film."

One of the reasons Mary was such a close friend was that her muggle born background allowed her to trade muggle references back and forth with Lily, just as Lily did with Sev.

She fixed a gimlet eye on Lily, "So, are you two dating now?"

"Well, I suppose so," said Lily slowly. "Why wouldn't we be?"

"Well, he kissed you, but did he ask you to be his girlfriend?"

There was a sudden sinking feeling in her stomach. "…No, not exactly."

"Well then, it was just a kiss. A kiss on its own doesn't mean that you're dating," she said glumly, and Lily knew her friend was basing that observation on her disappointing experience with Sirius Black.

"We, er, did more than just kiss, though."

"What?" Mary shrieked, bouncing up from her where she was still perched on her elbows. "Tell me! Tell me everything. I want all the details." She was practically vibrating with excitement.

Lily proceeded to give her friend a recap of the early hours of New Year's day so explicit that it would make a teenage boy blush.

"So, let me get this straight," said Mary with a frown. "You were alone in bed together, the entire house to yourselves, and all you did was talk dirty to each other while you groped his belly and he groped your arm?"

Lily buried her flaming face in a pillow, then straightened and lobbed the pillow at Mary. "You make it sound so weird!"

"It is weird! Your hand was down there anyway, all you needed to do was move it six inches lower!" she declared, demonstrating the cupping motion on the corner of the pillow.

"Mary!" she gasped, surprised by her friend's brisk turn around. One minute she didn't want her talking to Sev at all, the next minute she was encouraging her to, well —

Mary rolled her eyes. "You are such a prude."

"I'm not!" Lily insisted, "You definitely wouldn't call me a prude if you heard the things I was whispering in his ear that night."

Mary wrinkled her nose. "Ew, that's vile."

"Who's the prude now?" crowed Lily with a smug grin. They dissolved into a shared fit of shrieking giggles.

Mary was the first of them to sober down. "No, but seriously, Lily, have you considered that maybe he wants to keep it a secret?"

Lily's heart sank. She hadn't considered it. They hadn't talked about it at all. Come to think of it, he had acted quite reserved with her on the train ride back to Hogwarts. He hadn't even held her hand. Sure, Sev could be shy, but…

Mary folded the pillow over in her lap, leaning over it to peer closely into Lily's face. "I mean, his friends already tease him about you. So do Black and Potter. Maybe he doesn't want to invite any more of that."

Lily bit her lip, studying the coverlet intently. She must have appeared quite wretched, because Mary rushed to soothe her: "Maybe it's for the best, anyway."

"How's that?" Lily said tonelessly.

"Don't take this the wrong way, Lily, but you could do better." Lily made to jump in, but Mary held up a hand and she fell silent. "Come on, you have to know that's true. I mean, even if Snape really does care for you, let's be honest. He's not exactly the best looking bloke in the school, is he? And you…you're _Lily Evans_…you could have any boy you want. And…and you know Potter's got it bad for you." Lily scoffed at that. "No listen — hear me out — you can't tell me you don't enjoy the attention, even if he _is_ a toerag. You think he's still going to chase after you if he knows you're with Snape?"

Lily had never considered that Potter might stop paying attention to her. He had fancied her for so long, that she couldn't even imagine what her life would look like without his ubiquitous amorous presence in it. Not that it would bother her if he stopped chasing after her. Why would it? She didn't even like the prat. Why would she miss his regard?

But a disquiet had creeped into her chest; it now had Lily's heart within its clutches, and she couldn't quite shake it off.

She felt herself become inexplicably angry at Mary for even bringing up the possibility of Potter no longer fancying her. "What are you saying?" she said indignantly, "That I should keep my relationship with Sev a secret so that I can keep stringing Potter along? Even though I have no intention of ever going out with him?"

"All I am saying," answered Mary in a conciliatory tone, "is that maybe you should hold off on telling other people for now…just until you're sure about Snape."

At that moment, Charlotte, Marlene, and Diana burst into the room in a whirlwind of girlish chatter, and Lily was saved the difficulty of formulating a counter argument. She hopped off Mary's bed and dragged herself disconsolately over to her own. She crawled under the covers and closed the bed hangings, shutting out the happy chatter of her room mates.

It was going to be a long winter term.

* * *

Back in the Slytherin dormitories, Severus unpacked his trunk. His best mate, Evan Rosier, did the same next to him. Max Mulciber and Nathan Avery were still down in the common room, hastily scribbling away at unfinished holiday homework, and Damian Wilkes was taking a shower (and a wank, no doubt, given how long he'd been in there).

"Good Holiday?" asked Evan around a mouthful of Drooble's Best.

"Pretty good, yeah. I kissed Lily," Severus replied into his trunk, unsure how his friend would take the news.

Evan held the opinion that there was room for only one good looking red head in Severus's life, and it wasn't Lily as far as he was concerned. Severus knew this because Evan was crap at keeping his thoughts to himself, which was unfortunate when your roommate was a born legilimens. Severus also knew that Evan intended the sentiment in an entirely platonic way, his heterosexuality affirmed by all the pornographic fantasies about a certain Miss Shacklebolt (3) that Evan also couldn't keep to himself, much to Severus's perpetual dismay. Somebody really needed to teach the poor sod some semblance of occlumency one of these days.

The bubble that Evan had been blowing popped in his face. He peeled it off with one hand. "She kiss you back?"

"…Yep," he said, popping the 'p'.

Evan turned to him, brow furrowed. There was still some Drooble's stuck to his left cheek. He turned back to his trunk. "So, you and Evans, yeah?"

"Yeah."

"She make you happy?"

"Yeah."

"Good for you, mate."

"But the others…"

Evan shrugged one shoulder in that nonchalant way of his that Severus quite admired. "Fuck the others," he said.

Severus resolved to take his advice.

Lily went to sleep that night feeling decidedly glum. For a moment there she had really thought that she had finally gotten through to Mary. It was clear to her now that Mary would never understand her relationship with Sev. She would never approve. None of her friends ever would. She hadn't thought that their approval was so important to her. But if it wasn't, why was she so down about the prospect of not having it?

* * *

If only they could see in Sev what she saw in him.

Severus Snape was not a classically handsome bloke. Lily had to admit that even to herself. In certain lights and from certain angles, he was almost…_beautiful _in a striking sort of way, with his paler than pale skin, sharply defined cheekbones and jaw line, and thin but delicately curved lips. Nevertheless, he was nothing like the rugged blokes pictured in _Witch Weekly_ or the objectively perfect looking boys at Hogwarts (Sirius Black immediately sprang to mind) that all the girls seemed to swoon over. But there was something…something _about_ him. Some undefinable…sexual magnetism, for lack of a better term.

Severus was all angles and planes, and not just in his appearance, but also in his movement, his speech, and his gaze. It was really something about his posture and the way that he carried himself that exuded raw sexuality, and Lily felt certain that he wasn't even aware of it. There was a tautness in his muscles, in his furrowed brow and the rigid set of his jaw. He was like a tightly coiled spring; a dark, vital potential energy barely contained beneath the surface of his skin.

Lily loved the way that he walked, with his shoulders drawn up and in, arms held straight and hands in his pockets, chest ever so slightly angled forward, head tilted down and dark eyes warily surveying his surroundings from beneath his acutely angled brows, his entire body tense as he took long purposeful strides, a sharp bounce in his every step. His gait reminded Lily of a jungle cat…a feral, caged jungle cat, poised to pounce on you at any moment.

Everything about him was sharp and precise, the very opposite of James Potter's artlessly relaxed, languid sprawl. Severus was never smooth in his mannerisms. His movements were simultaneously jerky yet graceful, if such a thing were even possible. But Sev had always been a sublime mess of contradictions, and somehow he managed to pull it off anyway.

And Merlin, his _eyes_. Sev had the most expressive eyes that Lily had ever seen, and all that tightly wound intensity seemed to concentrate in his piercing gaze. The synergy of those eyes and that voice was enough to steal her breath away. At times, she thought that he was hypnotizing her, like a cobra mesmerizing its prey just before it strikes.

There was just such an intensity about him that had always thrilled her, even as a little girl. A quiet, introverted confidence without a touch of boastful arrogance. He was comfortable in his own skin, you could tell, but he preferred to hang back in the shadows. Yet, instead of melting into the background, he possessed a presence that instantly shifted the energy of any room into which he walked. It was subtle yet powerful, and made her shiver involuntarily every time he came near.

When Lily thought of Severus, she was reminded of that Walt Whitman poem…"I sing the body electric" (4). She often thought it could have been written about him.

_"But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,_

_It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists,_

_It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him,_

_The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth,_

_To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,_

_You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side."_

No, Sev was not a classically handsome bloke, but Lily was sure that she wanted him.

* * *

**Footnotes:**

1 – Mary MacDonald is the future Mary Cattermole.

2 – Marlene Moody is the future Marlene McKinnon.

3 – Miss Shacklebolt is the future Mrs. Zabini.

4 – I obviously did not write and do not own this poem.


	8. The Wrong Idea

**Author's Note**: Thank you to my beta, **aberrantstrain**, who has also become a good friend.

Thank you also to **yobadself**, for continuing to review every chapter. It means a lot to me!

**Chapter 8: The Wrong Idea**

Potter cornered Lily in the common room the next morning before breakfast. It was early still, dawn had not yet broken (1), and there were few students milling around.

"Hey Evans, catch!"

She whirled around and caught the envelope that was coming at her head like a Frisbee. "What's this, then?" she asked with a roll of the eyes.

"Your present."

"You already gave me a present before the break."

He had. It had been immaculately wrapped, probably because a Potter house elf had wrapped it. She never did find out what was underneath the beautiful wrapping, since she hadn't bothered opening it before shoving it back in his stupid face.

"Correction: I _tried_ to give you a present before the break. But since you wouldn't take that one, I thought I'd try again with a New Year's present…give you a second chance," he said magnanimously. "You know, to accept a present politely like a decent, normal person would."

Lily narrowed her eyes. "What's the catch?"

One of the first things she had learnt at Hogwarts, between the correct swish and flick of _Wingardium leviosa_ and that you had better decline politely whenever Hagrid offered you a rock cake, was that there was always a catch when it came to James bloody Potter.

Potter raised his hands in the air in front of him in a conciliatory gesture. "No catch, Evans, I swear. Just want to give the girl I like something I know she would like," he said in a tone approximating sincerity. Not that she was fool enough to fall for it.

Nevertheless, Lily turned the brightly covered envelope over in her hand. "And how on Earth would you know what I like?"

It was a valid question. For all that he insisted that he liked her, he hardly knew her. (To be fair, this was in large part because she mostly refused to give him the time of day, so it's not like he really had the opportunity to get to know her). And how genuinely smitten could you possibly be with a girl you hardly knew anything about? Potter knew only the aspects of herself that she revealed to him (which, more often than not, came down to scorn and irritation). Sev had literally experienced her thoughts and emotions as if they were his own.

"Oh trust me, Evans, you'll like this one," he said smugly.

Lily sighed. She really should just hand it back to him, especially now that she and Sev were, well, dating. She didn't want Potter to get the wrong idea. Then again, it seemed Potter was determined to get the wrong idea no matter what she did or didn't do. And she was curious to see what he had gotten her. Potter's gifts were usually large and ostentatiously wrapped. This envelope was very much the opposite of what she expected to get from him.

What could it hold anyway? Quidditch tickets? No, even Potter wasn't so clueless as to think she'd want tickets to a match. She thought for a moment it might contain money, until she remembered that Wizards didn't deal in pound notes. She sighed again, and broke the seal, removing several identical bits of parchment. She peered closely at one. It was covered in Potter's messy scrawl, and she could barely make out what it read.

"What the heck is this?" she asked him, growing more irritated by the second. Of course it would be some kind of a gag gift. She should have known better than to expect anything else.

Potter grinned quite confidently for a boy who had just given the girl he fancied an envelope full of illegible bits of parchment. "Those, my dear Evans, are _coupons_," he enunciated slowly.

Lily raised an eyebrow in a way that she knew was eerily reminiscent of Sev. She wondered whether Potter would pick up on the resemblance. "Coupons?"

"Yep. Each one is good for an entire day of me not asking you out," he said in a self-satisfied tone of voice.

Lily rolled her eyes, feeling oddly disappointed considering that she hadn't even wanted a gift from him in the first place. She shoved the bits of parchment back in the envelope and Frisbeed it back at him. He caught it deftly in one hand, without even taking his eyes off of her. Of course he would, the athletic prat. Suddenly sick of his face, she spun on her heel and started stalking off toward the portrait hole.

"Wait, Evans!"

She stopped in her tracks and spun around to face him again, hand on her hip. "What is it _now_, Potter?"

"Hogsmeade weekend this Saturday. Want to be my date?" he asked her cheekily.

She actually growled. (Potter often elicited noises out of her that nobody else seemed able to do.) "No, Potter! I don't want to be your date. Not now, not next weekend, not ever! How many times do I have to shout it into your thick skull before you stop asking me?"

He grinned widely, revealing a row of perfect pearly-white squares. "Should've kept those coupons after all, Evans," he said, waving the envelope between them. She lunged forward, making a desperate grab for it. "Ah-ah-ah! You missed your chance. See, I told you it was a good gift."

Un-believable! He was un-_fucking_-believable! The_ nerve_ of him! Just barely resisting the overpowering urge to punch him right in his smug face, she stormed out of the portrait hole to breakfast. The Fat Lady hollered indignantly after her about "unladylike force" and "disrupting my beauty sleep." Lily refrained from pointing out that no amount of beauty sleep was going to change brush strokes on canvas: that was just the way she was painted, and she had better accept it already, because the artist was certainly long dead by now.

She was half way to the Great Hall before the obvious solution occurred to her. Why hadn't she simply told Potter that she couldn't go to Hogsmeade, because she had a boyfriend now? He had given her the perfect opening to tell him about her and Sev. And maybe if he knew that she had a boyfriend, he would finally,_ finally_ back off and stop asking her out. Because that's what she wanted more than anything. For him to stop asking her out.

…Right?

* * *

Severus awoke the morning of his fifteenth birthday in an uncommonly good mood. Although, come to think of it, he had awoken in an uncommonly good mood every morning since first kissing Lily on Christmas day. It was fast becoming dangerous for his reputation: since they had returned to Hogwarts four days ago, Severus had caught himself staring off into empty air with a dreamy smile on his face, in both Charms and History of Magic. Worse, he had caught himself staring at her with a dreamy smile in classes they shared, like arithmancy and ancient runes. On one mortifying occasion he had caught his own expression in the mirror during his morning shave, and it had occurred to him that the look of a man in love rather alarmingly resembled the look of a man lobotomized.

Regardless, he had awoken in a particularly good mood today, because he had plans after dinner tonight to meet up with Lily for a private birthday celebration. They did this every year, of course, but he had a reasonable hunch that this year's private celebration might involve some good bit of snogging.

His good mood was only heightened when he spied the sizable pile of gifts at the foot of his bed. Evan Rosier and Nathan Avery, who were the pampered scions of extremely wealthy wizarding families, always gave him the most lavish gifts. From Nathan, he opened a black and silver brocade cloak lined with Chinchilla fur and never-fail _impervius_ charms. Evan's gift was his favourite — a black leather cuff with a silver pocket watch set into the front and a wand pocket with a custom-fit extension charm set in the back. With the cuff in place, a single flick of his left wrist just so had his wand sliding out of the pocket and into his waiting dominant hand in a split-second flourish. Perks of being left-handed.

Damian Wilkes, who came from a modest family background, but shared Severus's academic bent, gave him _A Treatise on Grindelwaldian Socialism_ (2), which was doubly well-received since it was so notoriously banned by the Ministry. Even Mulciber, who was more a friend by association through Avery than anything else, gifted him a package of assorted quills, ink, and parchment from _Scrivenshaft's_, which Severus appreciated if only because it meant that he didn't have to budget any of his own measly savings for stationary for the rest of the term. All in all, the day was shaping up well mint, and he hadn't even had breakfast yet.

They had double Charms with the Hufflepuffs that morning, and since Severus was already proficient with banishing charms, he elected to spend the whole period surreptitiously practising flicking his wand into his palm from his wrist holster, whilst ducking from his classmates' haphazardly banished pillows.

On his way out the door at the end of class, he was thrilled to run into Lily, who had finished Transfigurations early and was waiting to meet him as soon as his class got out. She took his hand and dragged him into an out of the way broom cupboard, whereupon she proceeded to very enthusiastically remind him that it was his birthday. The more vigorously she reminded him of the date, the harder it became for him to remember his name. By the time they stumbled out of the cupboard, they were already five minutes late to DADA.

But Severus knew that even having points docked for tardiness wouldn't ruin his good mood. Because today, _nothing_ could touch his euphoria.

* * *

James Potter spent an inordinate amount of time watching Lily Evans and Severus Snape. He watched them brew together, Slughorn's favourite pair. He watched them pass notes back and forth in DADA whenever Professor Moody turned her back to the class. He watched them whisper to each other in the courtyard during break, heads bent together over some obscure tome. Sometimes, he even watched their dots move together on the Marauder's map, until Sirius inevitably snatched the parchment out of his hand, muttering something under his breath about his best friend turning into an obsessed, creepy stalker.

James would have been watching Snape and Evans right now, too, except that they were late to arrive to DADA class this morning. Where were they? James had seen them on the train, as they always did. But something about them had seemed different. He wasn't sure what it was, but it was almost as if —

Just then the door to the classroom slammed open, startling James out of his reverie. The scratching of quills and rustling of parchment abated as sixteen heads turned in unison toward the heavy oak door. Evans rushed in, Snape skulking in right behind her.

"Miss Evans, Mr. Snape. You're late," snapped Professor Moody (3) in her heavy Scottish brogue. "We are starting our group projects today, and the students have already formed their groups. Miss Evans, you can join Mr. Potter and Mr. Black," she said, gesturing toward him and Sirius. "Mr. Snape, join Mr. Rosier and Miss Shacklebolt, please."

Instead of scuttling off to join their new groups, Snape and Evans stood rooted in place, turning to look at each other in bewilderment.

"Well?" Professor Moody did not look impressed.

It was Lily who spoke. "You're — you're separating us?" she asked, her voice pitched high with disbelief and even a bit of indignation.

"Yes, I'm afraid that I am. It's groups of three for this project. If you wanted to work together you should have arrived on time."

Lily's eyes widened comically. "But…but! We always work together!" It was true. They did.

Snape's distress was better concealed. He laid his hand on Lily's forearm. "It's okay Lily, it's just one project. We'll work together next time," he murmured to her softly. But his deep voice carried in the dead silence of the classroom, as everyone was riveted by the present exchange.

Lily stomped her foot. "But Se-_ev_!" she whined, the class breaking out in snickers at her petulant display. Snape quietly cringed beside her, his cheeks colouring a red to match Lily's school tie. As much as he fancied Evans, James couldn't imagine ever letting her talk to him in that way. Especially not in front of other people. Even his own friends gave Snivellus shit for it, he knew.

"Come on, Miss Evans. I haven't got all day." Professor Moody's lips had thinned to a state normally achieved only by McGonagall's. Evans was treading on dangerous ground here.

Thankfully, Lily seemed to snap out of her self-absorbed Princess bubble, and James watched her as she flounced over to him, a cute little pout on her face.

"You may be surprised to learn this, Evans, but the world won't actually end if you're separated from your boyfriend for an hour," crowed Sirius from his place next to James.

James and Sirius had spent the past four and a half years teasing Evans by calling Snivellus her boyfriend. Mostly because it still got a rise out of her, every time. Sure enough, she didn't disappoint them today.

Evans whipped around, eyes narrowed and hand on her hip. "He's _not_ my boyfriend! We're just friends," she said, predictably.

James looked over at Snape, expecting him to be similarly indignant, as he always was. But this time, there was a peculiar expression on his face that James couldn't quite place. It gave him pause.

But before he could examine it any further, he became distracted by what Evans said next: "And anyway, you're one to talk. I bet Potter can't even take a shit without you following him to the toilet to moon over him."

Evans really could be fantastically vulgar when it suited her. Must be her crass Northern roots. She and Snivellus did come from that industrial hell hole after all. But wait — what exactly was she implying about him and Sirius? James looked over at his best friend to see him blushing. Why was he blushing? James could count on one hand the number of times he had seen Sirius blush; he didn't think some asinine comment from Evans could be enough to do it.

Fortunately for Gryffindor's balance of house points, Professor Moody seemed not to have heard Lily's vulgar little comment. "Now, I want you all to use this class to formulate your topics for your group projects…" she said, voice carrying over the din of restless student chatter.

James spent the rest of the class trying to convince Lily to be his date on the upcoming Hogsmeade weekend. Lily spent the rest of the class turning him down, insisting that even if she wanted to go with him (which she didn't), she couldn't, because "Sev and I always go together" (which they did). Sirius spent the rest of the class in an unusually quiet mood, avoiding both James' and Lily's eyes.

* * *

1 - In fact, sunrise in Iverness, Scotland on the morning of January 6, 1975 was at precisely 8:57 am. God, I love Wolfram alpha!

2 - "The Greater Good"? The East European connections? Grindelwald was obviously a communist. Common ownership of the means of production? Check. Just replace "means of production" with "muggles." ;)

3 - Professor Moody is Marlene Moody's (Lily's friend) sister.

Check out AO3 for pictures of Sev's gifts, and see you next week! Oh, and please remember to leave a review! Ask me questions, complain, tell me what you think! I'd love to hear from you guys.


	9. A True Friend

**Author's Note: **Thank you to my beta, aberrantstrain, for reminding me to describe the Muggle Studies classroom. Thanks also to Guest for reviewing the last chapter.

**Chapter 9: A True Friend**

_"He's not my boyfriend!"_

She might as well have kneed him directly in the bollocks; it would have hurt a damn sight less than the ache in his gut brought on by her words in class earlier today. The incident had left Severus reeling, confused over the status of their relationship and insecure about Lily's feelings for him. Worse, he had been absolutely mortified, sitting as he was next to Evan, who must now think that he had made up the whole story about kissing Lily.

Severus had hurried from the room as soon as class was over, skipped lunch, and sulked his way all through his afternoon classes (none of which he shared with Lily, thankfully). By the time supper rolled around, he was famished, so he had reluctantly made his way over to the Great Hall, where he was still sitting over an hour later, dragging out his meal, because he knew that the minute that he got up, Lily would follow him out. They were still supposed to meet for his birthday, after all. It seemed that everything had changed in the blink of an eye with those four bloody words, but their plans had not.

For the first time that he could remember, Severus was actually dreading to spend time with Lily. He was so sick with dread, in fact, that he had lost his appetite, and had spent the past fifteen minutes pushing his beans and mash around his plate. His friends had all left, variously off to the library and the common room to get started on homework. He could see Lily darting impatient glances at him from across the Great Hall. Her plate was sitting empty in front of her, and he knew that she was waiting for him to finish, clearly anxious to leave. He sipped his pumpkin juice, stalling for time. Eventually, she huffed and got up, and he breathed a sigh of relief. But he tensed as he realized that instead of leaving the Hall, she was headed straight for him.

She came to a stop on the opposite side of the table in front of him. "Come _on_ Sev, what's taking you so long?" she said with a petulant pout that he was glad his friends weren't here to see.

He sighed internally and resolved himself to the uncomfortable evening ahead.

He followed her out of the Great Hall and to the empty Muggles Studies classroom, where they routinely met after supper. It was a small room, and filled to the brim with all sorts of obsolete Muggle knick-knacks (most of them out of working order), everything from a gramophone to a telegraph machine. Severus would never understand the point of hiring a Muggle Studies teacher who clearly hadn't lived among actual Muggles since the turn of the century.

Lily locked the door behind them and threw up a _Muffliato_ before they settled on the flagstone floor, backs against the far wall.

She smiled softly at him. "Happy birthday, Sev. How does it feel to be fifteen?" she asked, rooting around in her satchel. She fished out a small-ish box and handed it to him. "Don't shake it," she warned.

"Feels like fourteen, but with more homework," he replied. He took the gift from her carefully, resisting the urge to shake it. He flipped the lid of the plain cardboard box to reveal a set of two identical square silver compact cases. He picked one up and opened it, revealing that it was, in fact, a folding pocket mirror. He stared at it, bemused and a little hurt. "Is this some sort of hint that I need to take better care of my appearance?" he asked tonelessly.

Lily's jaw dropped. "What? Don't be daft!" She reached over and fetched the second mirror from the box on his lap, opening it and holding it in front of her own face. "They're two-way mirrors," she explained. "I charmed them myself! It only two me the entire month of December and a whole shelf of books on protean charms." He could hear her voice emanating both from her mouth and from the mirror at the exact same time. It was disorienting.

He peered curiously into his own mirror and saw Lily scowling indignantly back at him. "Oh. Clever," he told her, and watched as a smile broke out on her reflected face.

"I know," she said in a self-satisfied tone of voice. She snapped her mirror shut, and both her reflection and the echo of her voice disappeared from his own, which now appeared like any regular mirror, reflecting his own spotty face back at him. He grimaced as his eyes settled on a particularly juicy spot on his forehead, and snapped his own mirror shut as well. Fifteen was going to be hell. "I got them so that we could communicate and —" she faltered, suddenly falling silent.

"And?" he prompted.

She flushed, looking down, where she was picking at her cuticles in her lap. "Don't laugh — but I was thinking…well, I miss sleeping next to you, and I thought — I thought if we used the mirrors at night while we're sleeping it would be almost as if — as if we were lying next to each other." When he didn't respond, she looked up uncertainly at him, and rushed to explain: "If I woke up, I'd see you right there, and even when I'm asleep, subconsciously I'd feel like you're there by the sound of your snores…"

"Hey! I do _not_ snore," he interjected.

But Lily ignored his outburst, burying her face in her hands. "Oh god, you think it's a rubbish idea. It even sounds like a rubbish idea when I say it out loud now…You must think me so needy…" she moaned.

But Severus didn't think it was a rubbish idea, or needy. Okay, maybe a little bit needy. But he liked that. He liked that Lily missed sharing a bed with him so much that she had gone to all the trouble of enchanting a set of two way mirrors so that they could pretend that they were together in the same bed at night. His earlier anger and insecurity over Lily quickly dissipated, and he laid a hand on her back, trying not to grin like a loon.

"I think you're sweet. I like it," he murmured, pulling her into a hug.

She pulled back after a long moment, resting her forehead against his. "You do? Really?" she asked, eyes shining with unshed tears.

"Yeah. It _is_ a clever way to communicate, and…and I miss sleeping next to you, too," he admitted shyly.

Lily beamed a smile so wide that it sucked the breath right out of his chest, and closed the distance between them, meeting his lips in a tender kiss.

She pulled back slowly, still smiling, then turned to grab a second wrapped package out of her satchel, holding it out to him. It was large, flat, and soft.

"This one's just for fun," she said brightly.

Severus took the gift from her and turned it over, wedging his finger under the spellotape. "This better not be polyester," he warned in a mock serious tone of voice.

Lily punched him on the arm. "Who do you think I am, Petunia? I would never inflict polyester on you!"

The wrapping fell open to reveal a black tee shirt with the words "F—ck censorship!" emblazoned in white across the front.

He felt his face split into a wide grin. "I love it. Can't wait to wear it in front of your sister over Easter break."

"Good, because it took me all night and three ruined tee shirts before I got the screen printing charm to work properly." Now that he looked carefully at her, she did indeed have bags under eyes.

"I think it's sexy that you're a feminist, and I don't care if it's objectifying you to say that," he told her, casting his mind back a week to the conversation that spawned the tee shirt.

"You're allowed to objectify me sometimes; I'm your girlfriend," she said with a wink and a flirty smile that normally would have caused his chest to flutter. But today, he felt his body grow rigid and cold at her words. He stared resolutely ahead, his field of vision narrowing down to the poster of the London Underground affixed to the classroom wall in front of them.

"Are you sure?" he asked, voice cold and devoid of any inflection.

Lily's answer sounded to him as if it came from very far away. "What?"

Severus knew that she was playing dumb, and it incensed him. He knew it, because he could the feel the anxiety and the guilt radiating off of her in uneven waves, which was a sure sign that she was incompletely occluding him. Lily really was a crap occlumens when her emotions were heightened. Then again, she hadn't had much cause in the past to practise deceiving him.

Well, if she was going to play dumb, it meant he had no option left but to bring the issue up himself, and he resented her for making him be the one to do it. Especially on his birthday.

"Are you sure you're my girlfriend?" he repeated, louder this time. "Because that's not the impression that you gave Potter today," he finished bitterly.

"Oh Sev…is that what this is about?" she asked, feigning surprise and concern.

When had she become such a good actress? If he hadn't been a Legilimens, able to pick up the real emotions that conflicted with her feigned ones, he would have bought it.

Still staring ahead, he saw her arm reach out in the periphery of his vision, and felt it come to rest on the back of his neck. She tried to turn his head to face her, but he resisted. "Sev, look at me," she said urgently. "I didn't mean anything by it, I swear. It just slipped out…They were teasing us like they have a hundred times before, and I just said what I always say without even thinking about it. I didn't even realize what I'd said until after I'd said it."

He turned to her slowly, scrutinizing her carefully. "So, now that you realize what you said, you'll have no problem correcting him, right?"

Lily stilled like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. "What do you mean?"

"I mean," he elaborated, forcibly keeping his voice calm. "That you'll go up to Black and Potter and tell them that you misspoke? That I am, in fact, your boyfriend? You know, just to clear up any lingering confusion."

She remained silent for a long moment, and when she next spoke, in a placating tone, she wouldn't quite meet his eyes. "Listen Sev, I was thinking, maybe it's not such a bad idea to keep it quiet for now. You — you saw how they teased us, and they don't even know we're together. Think how much worse the rumours would be if they knew the truth about us. We'd never be left alone."

She had a point, yes, but he couldn't help but suspect that there was more to her desire for discretion than what she said. From the very moment he had heard her holler those words — _he's not my boyfriend_ — he hadn't been able to escape the notion that she was….ashamed. Ashamed for people to think that they were dating. Ashamed of _him_.

He didn't have the courage to confront her about it directly — saying the words out loud would hurt more than he could bear. But he had to know. So he did something he rarely did anymore, even around her. He lowered his shields, completely. His mind, laid bare and unprotected, was immediately assaulted by a jumbled cacophony of her partially occluded thoughts and feelings. She was attracted to him, yes, but she wished that others were attracted to him as well. She craved the external validation that came with dating a conventionally handsome, popular bloke. A bloke like —

He abruptly threw his shields back up in a sudden instinct of emotional self-preservation. That was the trouble with reading people — the reason that nearly every Legilimens went round the twist eventually, even if they learnt occlumency — brutal honesty was a double edged sword. It was tempting to know what others really thought of you, but once you did know, you almost always wished you hadn't looked.

The conversation had not progressed the way that he had hoped it would. But what could he do? Lily obviously wanted to keep the romantic aspect of their relationship under wraps for now. He could put his foot down and refuse to play the cloak and dagger game. But what if she felt so uncomfortable with the whole school knowing that they were going out that she ended it? The very possibility made his stomach twist into knots. No, he couldn't risk that. He would just have to follow her lead. He had no other choice.

He nodded. "Okay," he choked out, ignoring the pain in his chest.

Lily smiled hesitantly, and he could see her shoulders droop in relief. "Well, I'm glad we talked about it...cleared things up instead of letting them fester into resentment," she said softly. Her hand was still resting on the back of his neck, and she rubbed her thumb in circles soothingly. He relaxed into her touch despite himself. It felt good — reassuring — even if he wished in that moment that it didn't. It made him realize how much he depended on her touch, and the thought terrified him.

"Yeah, me too," he echoed.

But he couldn't help feeling that things were far from cleared up.

* * *

"That's fucking creepy, mate," said Evan cheerfully, as he lounged against his bedpost. Severus had just finished telling him about Lily's gift.

"It's not," Severus insisted.

Evan regarded Severus as if he were a particularly dim first year. "No really, it is." At Severus's blank look, he ran an exasperated hand through his short ginger locks, making them stand on end. "Your girlfriend enchanted a set of two way mirrors so that she could watch you while you sleep. If that's not creepy bordering on stalker, then it's at the very least exceedingly clingy."

"But I can watch her sleep too," he pointed out.

Evan shook his head wearily. "That doesn't make it better."

Severus frowned. Didn't it?

"By the way, guess who I'm taking to Hogsmeade with me on Saturday?" asked Evan with a self-satisfied grin.

"Mercedes Shacklebolt?" he volunteered immediately.

Evan's face fell. "How'd you guess?"

Severus snorted. "I'd have to be blind, deaf, and dumber than a concussed troll not to notice the way you fawned all over her in class today." He twisted his face into a grimace. "I can't believe I'm stuck the rest of term working on a project with the two of you lovebirds."

"_I_ was not fawning over _her_," enunciated Evan indignantly. "_She_ was fawning over _me_."

It was moments like these when the familial relation between Rosier and Black showed itself so glaringly as to be unmissable.

"Keep telling yourself that, mate," he responded with a smirk.

Evan grumbled good-naturedly.

"Speaking of fawning all over girls, I suppose you're taking Evans to Hogsmeade?"

"I reckon so," said Severus slowly. "She hasn't said otherwise. Why?"

"Well, now that she's your girlfriend, you know she's going to expect you to take her to Madam Puddifoot's, right?" Evan threw his head back and laughed. "Oh, I can't wait to see you in there. You're going to love the decor," he crowed gleefully.

Severus motioned for Evan to quiet down. He darted his eyes about the empty room, before shutting the door with a wave of his wand.

"Yeah…about that…listen, could you keep it quiet, you know, about me and Lily?" he said in a hushed tone. At Evan's wrinkled brow, he fidgeted with the cuff of his sleeve, and sighed."Only, we've decided to keep it a secret for now. We get teased enough as it is, no sense adding fuel to the fire, yeah?"

He didn't know what reaction he had been expecting, but the expression on Evan's face caused Severus to lighten his shields. What he sensed from Evan surprised him: genuine sympathy laced with a slight bit of righteous indignation on behalf of his friend.

He didn't always act it, but Evan was a perceptive bloke, and he was right on the mark as usual. Severus studied the tapestry of Merlin and Nimue embracing on the far wall while Evan scrutinized him; he was embarrassed and dreading what his friend would say next.

But he needn't have been worried. "Yeah, sure thing mate. My lips are sealed; permanent sticking charm," he assured, and pressed his lips together, making a zipping motion across them with his right hand.

In that moment, Severus was forcibly reminded why he liked Evan so much. True, he could be self-absorbed, and shallow, and he had a certain roguish charm that at times reminded him of Sirius Black. But he had just allowed Severus to save face on the matter of his girlfriend, and that was, in his estimation, the mark of a true friend.

* * *

**Author's Note 2**: No footnotes this time! But hop on over to AO3 for pictures of Sev's gifts!

And please review! It's extremely motivating to hear from you guys.


	10. Public Display of Affection

**Author's Note:** Thank you to my beta, aberrantstrain, who is dealing with RL issues, but still takes the time to talk HP with me every day. Thank you also to snapeslittleblackbuttons for her detailed review.

Check out AO3 this week for photos of what I imagine Evan Rosier and Mercedes Shacklebolt to look like.

Also, this chapter is 3000+ words of pure fluff. Sorry about that. But fear not: next week's chapter (which has been written for weeks) finally starts to get into the political meat of the story.

**Chapter 10: Public Display of Affection**

The morning of the Hogsmeade visit, Severus awoke to Lily's angelic smile reflected to him through his two-way mirror. It was held to the bed hangings beside his face with a re-peelable sticking charm.

"Hello sleepyhead," she crooned softly, "ready for Hogsmeade today?"

Severus's heart constricted in his chest. How nice would it be to wake up next to her like this every morning? They had tried the mirrors for the first time the night before, and good thing they had waited until the Friday to do so, because they had stayed up half the night talking. Lily had had the genius idea of casting a _Muffliato_ to encompass themselves and the voice emerging from the mirror, and their dorm mates had been none the wiser.

It was strange to be able to see her and hear her and yet not be able to reach out and touch her. It was stranger still to be gazing directly into her eyes and yet be unable to sense the residue of her emotions. This two-dimensional, cerebrally silent facsimile of Lily almost made him miss her more, and he ached with the desire to hold her in his arms and surrender to the tidal wave of her unoccluded feelings.

"Meet you in the Entrance Hall after breakfast?" he asked. They typically walked over to Hogsmeade together.

"Yep," she confirmed with a wide grin.

"What're we doing today?" he asked her, while slipping his hand under his tee shirt to scratch his belly. He winced as his own whine assaulted his ears, and he realized that over the years, he had come to depend on Lily to make up the schedule for their day. How pathetic was that?

Lily certainly didn't seem to mind, as she started to rattle off their scheduled stops. "Well, first we need to stop off at Dervish &amp; Banges to drop off my telescope to get fixed, then Tomes &amp; Scrolls, I've lost my copy of _1001 Magical Herbs and Fungi_, and then lunch at the Three Broomsticks of course, and then oh! We need to stop by Scrivenshaft's, you're all out of parchment."

"No, Mulciber gave me a bunch for my birthday, remember?" he interjected.

"Oh yeah. I forgot. That should be enough to last you the rest of the year for sure."

He and Lily used parchment, quills and ink only to turn in assignments and write exams. For their own note-taking, it was biros and notebooks from home, which were far more user-friendly and cheaper, besides. As a result, they got by with a fraction of the supply of parchment that their classmates did.

His bladder spasmed as he scratched his hand across it. "Okay, I got to piss. See you after breakfast," he said, unsticking his mirror from the bed hangings with a wave of his wand and snapping it shut.

An uncharacteristically distraught looking Evan cornered him in the loo, where he was fussing over his hair in the mirror.

Severus wrinkled his nose, his eyes watering. "Jesus Christ, Rosier, you smell like you crash landed into an enormous vat of cologne."

"Jesus Christ?" questioned Evan with a frown.

Oh, right. "Nevermind. Muggle saying." Severus muttered under his breath. He often slipped back into taking the Lord's name in vain (instead of Merlin's) after he'd been home in Cokeworth with his Catholic parents. Especially his father, who cursed as good as you'd expect any tinker turned mill worker to curse.

Evan was now sniffing the collar of his purple button down shirt. "Too much?" he asked, voice muffled.

"That depends. Are you trying to seduce her or to obtund her?" Severus deadpanned.

Evan looked at him with wide eyes. Wide, desperate, almost crazed eyes. Severus took a step back, bumping against a sink.

"I can't do this," said Evan, an increasing note of panic to his voice.

"The charm you're looking for is _effunderetur odor_ (1)," Severus snarked.

Evan waved an impatient hand. "No, I mean, I can't take Mercedes on a date. She's — she's a goddess and I'm just a mere mortal and she's going to laugh in my face before she squishes me like the insignificant insect that I am," he blurted in a single breath, his voice ending up an entire octave higher by the end of it.

Severus was taken aback. In the four and a half years that he had shared a dorm with him, he had never known Evan to question himself before. And here he was having a full-scale crisis of confidence. Over a girl. Granted, saying that Mercedes Shacklebolt was just a girl, was like saying that a dragon was just a lizard.

Evan stepped toward him, grasping him by the shoulders. "You — you could come with me! Yes! Then I wouldn't have to face her alone!"

Severus raised an incredulous eyebrow. "You want to bring a friend along on your date? You really think that's the way to go about impressing her?"

"Just for the start," Evan begged. "If I make it through the first 15 minutes without vomiting all over myself, you can leave."

Severus hesitated. "But, I already made plans with Lily."

"Bring her!" said Evan excitedly. "That's even better. They can talk to each other about whatever it is that pretty, popular girls talk about."

Severus shifted from foot to foot in Evan's hold, casting his mind about for a way — any way — out of this.

Evan tightened his grasp on Severus's shoulders. "_Please_ Severus, it's the only way. It's too late to brew a calming draught."

Evan's blue eyes beseeched him, and Severus found himself inexplicably swayed. "Alright," he conceded. "I'll let Lily know. But we're not tagging along with you the whole day."

Evan's face broke out into a relieved smile. "Thanks, mate, you're the best." He let go of Severus's shoulders and clapped him on the back.

Severus could feel the waves of gratitude and genuine affection radiating off of his friend, and he knew that he had made the right decision.

Severus had always felt a certain distance between himself and the other boys in the dorm. It wasn't his dorm mates' doing — on the contrary, they had made a concerted effort to include him, but had gradually given it up as a bad job as Severus consistently turned down their invitations in favour of spending all of his free time with Lily. It had never been an issue for him until this year, when he had found himself craving male companionship for the first time in his life — a certain camaraderie that Lily simply couldn't provide. Out of the four boys, he had always felt the most all-around affinity for Evan. Avery and Mulciber were sort of their own little duo, and Wilkes was a sound enough bloke, but mostly kept to his books. Charming, vivacious, and genial, Evan was the sort of boy who seemed to be friends with everyone, although upon closer reflection, Severus realized that the boy lacked a true best mate. He had felt Evan gravitating toward him recently — their simultaneous foray into the World of Girls seeming to unite them on some level — and he found himself welcoming the newfound closeness.

Yes, helping out Evan was the right decision. All he had to do now was to convince Lily to join them.

He left the bathroom and made his way back over to his bed, opening the mirror back up, but nothing other than his own reflection stared up at him. She must have shut hers, and he had no way of telling her to open it back up. He needed to figure out some way of alerting her by way of the mirrors…perhaps some sort of a ringer in the vein of a telephone…

He sighed and started to get dressed, pulling on a pair of worn denims and a Slytherin vest. He would just have to catch her at breakfast. Hopefully she wouldn't mind that he had sprung the change of plans on her with such short notice. He intended to wait for Evan so that they could walk up to the Great Hall together, but ten minutes later, Evan was still fussing with his hair in the mirror, so Severus gave it up as a lost cause and made his way up on his own.

When he reached the Hall, he noticed that Lily was already at the Gryffindor table, next to her friend, Mary McDonald. He crept up behind her, and cleared his throat, but they were having themselves a right proper chin wag (2), and didn't even notice him standing there.

He rolled his eyes, and tapped her on the shoulder. "Lils, can I talk to you for a minute?"

Lily twisted her upper body around and smiled as soon as she spied him.

But Severus found himself preoccupied by the peculiar appraising look on McDonald's face. He lowered his shields slightly to investigate, and got a whiff of — was that curiosity? He was tempted to drop his shields completely, but there were so many students around that he wouldn't be able to separate McDonald's mental emissions from those of the bystanders, unless he actually invaded her mind. And he almost never did that with anyone other than Lily, since active legilimency (the kind where you actually breached a person's mind) was tricky to perform without arousing the subject's suspicion that something was amiss, even if hardly anyone would be able to identify that something as legilimency, given the general population's woeful unfamiliarity with mind magic. Nevertheless he didn't really fancy landing himself a stint in Azkaban, and figuring out why Mary McDonald should be curious about him was hardly worth the trouble.

Lily climbed off the bench and followed him to the far wall. They stood together beneath a shaft of light, the rays scattering widely as it refracting through an enormous stained glass window.

"What is it, Sev?" she asked, tilting her head to the side.

Severus ran a hand through his hair. "Listen, there's been a slight change of plans. Evan is taking Mercedes Shacklebolt to Hogsmeade today and he had a minor fit this morning he's so anxious."

"What's that got to do with us?" said Lily unconcernedly.

He shoved his hands in his pockets, wringing them where they were out of sight. "What it is, right…see Evan's gone and asked us to tag along on the start of his date, so he can ease himself into it with her." At Lily's blank expression, he hurriedly added, "It'd only be for, say, half an hour, tops, all right?"

Lily bit her lip, squinting off through the window into the distance. "Are you sure Rosier wants me there? He's not exactly my biggest fan."

"He specifically wants you to come along to talk Girl with Mercedes," he assured her.

Lily made a great production of rolling her eyes. "Talk Girl? You make it sound like it's a different language."

He raised his hands up in front of him, eyes wide. "Swear down, it practically is."

She sighed in exasperation and crossed her arms. "I hardly even know her. What am I supposed to talk to her about?"

Severus was struck with a sudden stroke of insight. "Evan's exact words were 'whatever pretty, popular girls talk about.'"

Lily couldn't hide her pleased smile. "He called me pretty?" Her eyes softened. "Well, all right then, but I'm keeping you to half an hour."

Severus grinned. His stroke of insight had been right on the mark. If there was one thing that was guaranteed to soften Lily Evans up, it was flattery. "Thanks Lils, that's well mint." (3)

* * *

As it turned out, Evan needn't have worried about impressing Mercedes Shacklebolt. Almost from the moment that the four of them squeezed in around a table at the packed Three Broomsticks, Evan and Mercedes had retreated into their own little bubble of new teenage puppy love. They were so wrapped up in each other that they barely spared Lily and Severus a glance, never mind a word. He watched, entranced, as a giggling Mercedes fed Evan a chip off her plate. He cringed at Evan's wide, dopey grin. He didn't look like that when he was alone with Lily, did he? God help him if he did.

Severus found himself caught between genuine happiness for his friend, second hand embarrassment at their shameless display, and a wistful sort of envy. Mercedes clearly wasn't afraid to be seen on a date with Evan. He chanced a glanced at Lily, who was politely feigning interest in her butterbeer, while surreptitiously sneaking voyeuristic little glances at the Slytherin couple in front of her. Did she envy them too? He probed the outskirts of her mind gently, but found her to be fully occluding.

Mercedes' sultry voice broke him out of his maudlin mood. "Nice talking to the two of you. We're, er, going to go for a walk. See you later, Severus, Lily," she said, vaguely nodding in their direction, though her lovestruck eyes never strayed far from Evan's face. They traipsed out the door, holding hands and whispering to each other.

Left alone together, an awkward silence ensued between him and Lily. Looking for some way to break it, he sprang out of his chair and hurried up to the bar to get them another round of butterbeers.

Lily hadn't offered to split the tab. That was new.

He returned to the table, popping the cap of Lily's butterbeer with his belt buckle (4) before handing it to her and doing the same with his own bottle. She took it from him absent-mindedly, her attention diverted. He followed her gaze to a nearby table, which hosted Potter and his fan club. But far from their usual boisterous display, they looked to be sitting in compete silence, apart from Pettigrew, who seemed to be telling jokes and not realizing that he was the only one at the table laughing. The rest of the lot looked practically solemn. Well, that was peculiar.

Potter was watching Lily. Black was watching Potter. MacDonald and Lupin were watching Black. And Pettigrew, as always, remained thoroughly oblivious.

"Sickle for their thoughts?" asked Lily, sliding a silver coin to him across the table. She wasn't a legilimens herself, but Lily often asked him to peek into their classmates' heads when she was curious enough. Instead of scanning the thoughts of the Gryffindors at the next table, Severus slipped deftly into Lily's mind, and she let him. He saw immediately that Lily's suspicions about Black mirrored his own.

Severus slid the coin back over to her. "Save your silver. You've got the right idea already." He lowered his voice conspiratorially: "You don't need to be a legilimens to tell that Black's got it bad for him."

Lily smiled triumphantly, before her brows knit together. "But…how does Lupin fit into all of this?"

He smirked. "You mean, apart from being a gay werewolf?"

Lily reached across the table and smacked him on the arm. "Oh, would you stop it. He is not a werewolf." Her expression turned thoughtful. "Besides, I reckon he's bisexual, you know, like David Bowie." (5)

Severus raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

"I've caught him staring at my tits in the common room," she explained in a matter of fact tone.

Severus growled low in his throat.

"Oh, don't be a hypocrite. I let you stare at them all the time," she said flippantly.

Heat licked his cheeks. He scowled half-heartedly. "If you don't want me looking at them, you should put a sticking charm on the top two buttons of your shirt. They keep coming undone. Especially in Potions. It's quite distracting, you know. I nearly melted our cauldron that time we were brewing antidotes before Christmas."

Lily giggled. "I know. I'm the one who rescued it at the last minute." It was true. She hadn't merely rescued the cauldron — she had completely fixed the antidote, and they had gotten top marks. She really was a little Potions genius. "Your mistake, Severus Snape," she continued patiently, "is assuming that my shirt buttons coming undone is an accident," she finished with a saucy little lip bite that had Severus instantly hard in his keks (6). Blast. Not again. He glanced back over at the Gryffindor table to distract himself. Catching sight of Potter's smug face was always good for deflating an inconvenient erection.

"Your friend MacDonald looks downright miserable," he remarked. Arms crossed, she was staring disconsolately at the table top, sneaking glances every once in a while at Black, who continued to ignore her in favour of Potter. She wore a tight, low cut tee shirt meant to emphasize her shapely figure (which it did nicely) and capture Black's attention (which, unfortunately for her, it didn't).

Lily sighed, picking at the label on her butterbeer. "She's supposed to be on a date with Black."

Suddenly, Severus had an idea. "Why don't you invite her over here? Rescue her from her afternoon of playing third wheel to Black and Potter?" Not that he cared, but he figured that playing nice with Lily's girl friends was bound to win him some points.

He was wrong.

Lily suddenly clammed up, shifting in her seat. "What, so she can play third wheel to us instead?" She let out a nervous sounding giggle.

He would have let it go, chalking Lily's reticence up to the fact that Lily's friends weren't overly fond of him, and made no secret of it. Except that instead of reading that sentiment from her, he was reading precisely….nothing. Because she had completely occluded him out. Severus narrowed his eyes. She was hiding something. And she didn't want him talking with MacDonald. But why? He resolved to get to the bottom of it.

"Oh please, it's me who's going to be the third wheel, listening to the two of you bitch on and on about Black. Besides, if she joins us, we won't look like we're on a date," he finished bitterly.

* * *

Deperate to divert the conversation away from the secret nature of their relationship, Lily reluctantly waved Mary over to their table.

Mary frowned in confusion, pointing at herself, as if to ask _'who, me?'_ Lily gave an exaggerated nod in return. Mary dithered for a moment, before pushing her chair back and shuffling hesitantly over to their table. She shot Sev an apprehensive look before perching herself onto the chair next to Lily.

"It looked like you could use some rescuing," said Lily by way of explanation.

Mary dropped her chin into her hands, elbow resting on the table. She huffed a breath, which lifted up her fringe. "Yeah, he hasn't said two words to me all day. I don't know what I've done wrong."

"Oh Mary, I'm sure it's got nothing to do with you…" said Lily, laying a hand on Mary's back.

To her surprise, Sev piped up at that moment. "Lily's right, you know. Trust me, when I say that there is no other girl in the world that Sirius Black would rather spend the day with."

Lily caught his eye and shook her head in admonishment. This was definitely not the time nor the place to make veiled insinuations about Sirius Black's sexual orientation. Sev widened his eyes in mock innocence, and Lily rolled her own eyes, trying to reign in the twitching of her lips.

Mary looked up at Sev with a bemused half-smile. She appeared to have missed his insinuations, and hadn't been expecting his vote of confidence. "Thanks, you two."

Sev caught Mary's eye, and a peculiar expression crossed his face. It made Lily shift uneasily in her seat. But just as quickly, it was gone, to be replaced by a small smile of his own. "You're welcome, MacDonald."

They spent the rest of the day keeping Mary company, and perhaps most shocking of all, Sev and Mary actually seemed to get on well enough. It was a stark contrast to Mary's plain disapproval a mere week ago, and it threw her for a loop.

Perhaps she had been too hasty, shrouding her relationship with Sev in secrecy. It would have been nice to be able to stroll down the streets of Hogsmeade, her hand encased in his.

* * *

1 - Latin for 'diffuse the odour'. At least, according to google translate. I took 4 years of Latin in high school and sadly don't remember a single word of it.

2 - Chin wag is slang for gossip fest

3 - Well mint means excellent

4 - I once had a guy do this for me, and it was the sexiest thing ever. Don't ask me why.

5 - David Bowie announced that he was bisexual in the January 22, 1972 issue of Melody Maker. It made the front page.

6 - Keks is a mancunian word for trousers


	11. Pot & Kettle

**Author's Note 1**: Thank you to my beta, **aberrantstrain**, who gave me detailed feedback on this chapter.

Thank you also to **snapeslittleblackbuttons** for her review.

This one is a pivotal chapter, so pay careful attention as you read!

**Chapter 11: Pot &amp; Kettle**

Saturday morning of his second week back at school found Severus eating breakfast in the Great Hall, surrounded by all four of his room mates. He was scooping porridge into a bowl, when an owl dropped the _Daily Prophet_ in front of Damian Wilkes, who was sitting across from him and Evan.

Damian scanned the front page, as he did every morning, then lowered the paper, his brow crinkled. "Hey, Evan, your dad's in the paper this morning. Front page."

Evan looked up from his bangers and mash. "Yeah? Give it here then, let's see."

Damian passed the paper across the table to Evan, who immediately started reading the front page article, Severus peering over his shoulder.

_POT AND KETTLE IN HOT WATER_

_Rita Skeeter_

_Venerable family-owned business Pot and Kettle yesterday morning announced it will be filing for bankruptcy after suffering staggering losses exceeding 5 million galleons for the 1974 fiscal year. Pot &amp; Kettle, a fixture of Diagon Alley since 1671, is owned by the esteemed Potter family, and sells all manner of housewares and domestic goods to suit the needs of the modern Wizarding family. Following the announcement, share prices dropped from 30G 5s per share to 2G 8s per share, and continue to decline as of press time. Ripples could be felt throughout the British Magical Market, as panicked investors looked to foreign markets. An emergency meeting of the Wizengamot was held yesterday afternoon and rumour has it that they are considering financing a last minute loan to bail out the troubled business._

_What landed Pot and Kettle, historically one of the most profitable businesses in the international magical community, so suddenly in hot water? Regrettably, the Potter family could not be reached for comment, and therefore we can only speculate. However, member of Wizengamot and leader of the opposition Magical Peoples' Democratic Party of Britain, Asmodeus (1) Rosier, had this to say: "I'm not surprised that Pot and Kettle went under. In this climate of run away inflation, businesses will struggle to survive. Pot and Kettle is just the tip of the iceberg. I have been saying for years now that if we do not start to curb Ministry spending and increase productivity, we will have a financial crisis on our hands. And as I have said before, we need to seriously re-think the merits of our banking system. Of course, there are some very powerful forces in the Wizengamot that favour the status quo, but those forces are not working for the people, for the common every day witch or wizard. And until we have a Wizengamot that is accountable to the magical people of Britain, we will not have a Wizengamot that operates in their interests." Strong words from Mr. Rosier, who has been reprimanded in the past by Chief Warlock Albus Dumbledore for speaking his mind to the press regarding internal Wizengamot business._

_Mr. Rosier brings up fundamental questions about the wisdom of our Goblin run banking system and even — dare we suggest — the validity of an unelected (2) Wizengamot's mandate to rule. But the question on the mind of Mrs. Molly Weasley, 25, of Ottery St. Catchpole, mother of two, is much less controversial, though no less important: "where will I get my dish towels now?"_

_While Mrs. Weasley's concerns are certainly valid, other Wizarding families are perhaps more troubled by the impact that such a large bankruptcy could have on the stock market — and on their retirement savings._

"You tell 'em, dad!" said Evan, his face breaking out into a wide grin.

Damian bit his lower lip. "He needs to be careful what he says. You know the Wizengamot doesn't like him talking to the papers."

"Fuck the Wizengamot," said Evan with a scowl that was strikingly at odds with his usual easy manner.

"Yeah," chimed in Severus, "the only thing worse than censorship is self-censorship."

Whatever Damian was going to say to that was cut off by Avery, who leaned in over his head and asked in his booming voice, "Hey boys, you two coming with to Slug Club today?" He was referring to Severus and Evan. The Avery and Rosier names guaranteed admission to the Slug Club from first year, whereas the Wilkes and Mulciber names decidedly did not. Although Wilkes, at least, was smart enough to merit an admission on his own, in Severus's private opinion. He, himself, was a fixture at these events almost certainly only because of Slughorn's fawning regard for Lily.

"Yeah, might as well," said Evan, "there'll be crystallized pineapple."

Avery scrunched up his face. "Euch, I can't believe you actually like that shit." He was right, the stuff was downright vile. "What about you?" he asked, turning to Severus.

"Yeah, Lily will expect me there," he said with a deep sigh, stirring his porridge listlessly with his left hand, his chin resting in his right.

Four pairs of eyes rolled in their sockets simultaneously, and Mulciber, the prat, made a sound that cracked the air like a whip.

* * *

Later that afternoon, Lily peered around Slughorn's office from her place next to Sev. The table in front of them was decked out in a deep purple tablecloth, and fine crystal bowls filled to the brim with crystallized pineapple gleamed in the torchlight in front of each guest. They all remained untouched apart from the bowl in front of Slughorn, and, oddly enough, the one in front of Evan Rosier: he had made quick work of his own, and had already started in on Mercedes's portion.

Slughorn flung a corpulent arm around Potter's shoulders, herding him to the table. "Ah, our dear Mr. Potter, so glad you came. Such a _shame_ what's happened to Pot &amp; Kettle. I've never known a finer place to get oneself a dish towel. Please, express my condolences to Charlus and Dorea. It must be a terribly difficult time for the family. Such a formidable business, and to see it have to close its doors…yes, yes, it's all terribly sad."

At that moment, head boy Frank Longbottom jumped in. "Oh, I think we're being a bit hasty here. I suspect very much that Pot &amp; Kettle is here to stay. In fact," he said with an air of self-aggrandizement, "I have it on good authority that the Wizengamot will be voting in favour of a bail out next week."

Evan Rosier, who was sitting on Sev's other side, scowled. It occurred to Lily that she had never seen Rosier scowl before. "That's just what we need in this economy: more debt. Why should Pot &amp; Kettle get a free hand out with the taxpayer money that ordinary working families can barely afford to pay?" It was, Lily thought, a surprising thing for Rosier to say: he came from a family just as affluent as the Potters. What did he know about ordinary working families? And why should he care about their means?

Longbottom replied superciliously: "It's clear you understand nothing of economics. By saving Pot &amp; Kettle, we _are_ saving the economy."

At that point, Sev jumped in. "Yeah, for the rich," he said snidely.

This incensed Longbottom. "Excuse me?"

"All you're doing is saving the shares of people rich enough to invest in the market. Those families struggling on Knockturn Alley don't have a knut to spare for investing in anything."

Lily noticed fifth year Slytherin prefect Narcissa Black eyeing Sev appraisingly, as if she had never seen him before. Lily had, up until now, neglected to form any sort of an opinion regarding the mild-mannered beauty, but decided in that moment that she actually quite didn't like her. She leaned in closer to Sev and placed a casual hand on his arm. Narcissa's eyes followed the movement, but her expression did not waver.

Little Barty Crouch piped in: "My father says that the wealth trickles down from the rich to the poor. So if the people at the top aren't doing well, everyone suffers."

Regulus Black, who was a fellow third year Slytherin, snorted. "Trickle down economics is just a euphemism for the rich pissing on the poor."

"Nice one Reg," said Sev approvingly, and Regulus beamed in pride.

"Don't talk about things you don't understand, Reg, you'll only make yourself look stupid," said Sirius Black, and Regulus's face fell as if Sirius had just kicked his puppy for sport.

"That's rich coming from you, Black," retorted Sev, coming to Regulus's defence. "The only thing you understand about finance is how to spend your parents' money in ways you reckon will spite them the most."

"Now, now, boys! Let's not fight amongst ourselves," cut in Slughorn, whose eyes had been pinging back and forth between the boys in increasing consternation, "we're all friends here —"

But Slughorn's attempt to diffuse the situation backfired as several male voices interjected at once, each one with some indignant variation of: "Like hell we are!"

Lily removed her hand from Sev's arm, feeling uncomfortable. She caught Mercedes's eye, and noticed her shrinking away from Rosier beside her. Narcissa continued to appear completely unperturbed; her ice blue eyes remained fixed on Severus in a way that made Lily bristle.

Slughorn hastily cut in, voice booming over the din. "Alright! I think that's enough for today. Back to your dorms. See you all next month!" He used his bulk to herd the still bickering boys out the door.

Lily slipped out of Slughorn's office, rushing to catch up to Severus, who had stormed off ahead of her, still in a snit over something that Sirius Black had said.

Halfway down the main dungeon corridor, Severus came to a sudden stop, spinning around to face her. "What do you think about all this bail out business, anyway?"

Lily averted her eyes, conscious of the few students milling around them. "Oh, I don't know, I suppose I agree with you. Listen, Sev, I need to stop by Gryffindor tower to sort my laundry for the house elves. Meet you in the library in an hour? We've got that Arithmancy quiz first thing Monday morning."

And with that, she hurried off down the corridor and up the stairs, leaving Sev behind in the dungeons.

* * *

After Lily ran off, Severus returned to the Slytherin Common Room. He was now sat on an overstuffed green velvet sofa, killing an hour until he was due to meet up with Lily in the library. Lily…who had given him the brush off back there, when he had asked for her opinion on the Pot &amp; Kettle situation. "I suppose I agree with you". What the bloody hell was that supposed to mean? Severus had never known Lily to be shy about expressing her opinion: quite the opposite in fact, she often put him in his place with frightening zeal. She kept him on his toes, and he liked that about her. So he found her behaviour earlier to be particularly disconcerting. Either she disagreed with him and didn't want to have a row over it, or she genuinely didn't care either way. Neither option was particularly promising, and he didn't even know which of them was more likely, because she had been occluding like hell.

He had been staring absently into the fire in front of him, his eyes following the flames dancing above the faintly crackling logs in the fireplace, when he noticed a slight shadow fall over him. He looked up and was met with the large, clear, sky-blue irises of Narcissa Black. Her flaxen hair cascaded over her shoulders, framing her pale, elfin face. She wore her school uniform as if it were a diaphanous gown of the finest silk. The overall effect was that of an angel fallen to Earth.

"Hello, you're Severus, right? You're friends with my cousin?" Her voice was soft and mellifluous, her words clipped in artlessly perfect Received Pronunciation.

He realized he was gaping at her and snapped his mouth shut. Then opened it up again when he realized that he was still staring at her without saying anything. He hesitated. Friends with her cousin? Oh yeah, she and Evan were cousins through her mother, Druella Rosier. "Yeah, I'm him. I mean, yes, that's me," he stuttered, his tongue oddly thick and heavy in his mouth. He felt as if he were speaking through a mouthful of molasses.

She graced him with a small smile that made his heart flip in his chest. "I'm Narcissa Black."

"I know who you are. Everyone knows who you are — you're Narcissa Black!"

And why was she talking to him? Being approached by Narcissa Black was like being approached by a unicorn in the middle of the forbidden forest. It just didn't happen to people like him. No seriously, why was she talking to him? It suddenly occurred to him why it was that he had no idea: there was nothing whatsoever radiating off of her. She was completely blank, occluding him so well that he would think her a muggle, if the thought of Narcissa Black as a muggle wasn't so patently ridiculous. How did she know — oh right, Bellatrix must have taught her.

"Yes, I am," she said, blinking placidly at him.

He rushed to amend his statement. "I mean, you're a prefect so that's how I know you, know what I mean?" He winced. Of course she didn't know what he meant. He was barely coherent. Even he didn't really know what the hell he was saying.

"Right. Well, actually," she paused, biting her lip apologetically, "I have a favour to ask of you."

"Oh," he said, trying to not to let his disappointment show. Of course that would be the only reason a girl like her would deign to speak to a boy like him.

"I was listening to what you had to say just now at the Slug Club meeting. And, you seem like you're awfully knowledgeable about economics."

The silence stretched between them, and he realized she expected him to answer. "Er, yes. I suppose so," he said, although right at the moment he couldn't recall a single thing about economics, micro or macro.

"You see I really wanted to be able to participate in that conversation back there. Only, I don't know the first thing about the economy, or about politics," she said, and was that — could that be — was Narcissa Black actually blushing?

"I'm sure you know more than you think," he said, hurrying to reassure her. Something was terribly wrong with the world if Narcissa Black, of all people, felt insecure about something.

She shook her head. "No. Really, I don't. It's okay, I can admit when I don't know something. And I'm not the type to spout off ignorant opinions about things I don't understand." Severus wondered, not for the first time, how on Earth it was that she could possibly be related to Sirius Black. "So anyway," she continued, "I was wondering — hoping — that we could sit down for a bit and you could maybe explain to me what everyone was talking about back there so that I might gather for myself an informed opinion on the matter."

"Uh, sure. I can do that."

"Great. That's great," she said brightly, and this time her smile was warm and reached all the way to her eyes. If his heart flipped before, it did a full somersault this time.

"Um, when?"

"How about now?"

"I can do that," he repeated, his upcoming meeting with Lily completely slipping his mind.

* * *

When Lily climbed through the portrait hole, the first thing she noticed was Potter sitting by himself in front of the fire, staring morosely into the flickering flames. She approached him, but he appeared not to notice her, his eyes fixed in a glassy stare. She could see the firelight reflecting off of his glasses.

It was most unusual for Potter not to take notice of her at once, and it filled her with disquiet. For the first time in her life, Lily deliberately attempted to get James Potter's attention.

"Potter — James!" he shook himself out of his daze, listlessly turning his face to look up at her. "I, uh, just want you to know that I'm sorry about Pot &amp; Kettle."

"Thanks," he said dully, turning back to the fire.

She cleared her throat. "That, uh, must have been uncomfortable for you, back there. You know, with everyone talking about it."

Now that she thought back on it, she realized something…surprising: Potter, for his part, hadn't chimed in once. In fact, for the first time that she could remember, Potter had looked decidedly uncomfortable and out of place. Usually, he acted as if he owned (or ought to own) every room that he walked into.

Potter — James, ran his hand through his hair in an absent minded gesture, ruffling it into an even greater state of disarray, if that were possible. "Listen, I'm not stupid," he said, talking into the fire, "I know what people think of me. Everyone thinks I've had it so good, growing up in the lap of luxury with parents who love me and wanting for nothing. And, well, they're right. I have had it easy. Nothing bad has really happened to me or my family before — I mean, the greatest tragedy in my life so far has been losing a game of Quidditch," he finished, catching her eye with a weak smile that made Lily's heart hurt for him. "But the way people are talking about this — it's almost as if they're glad to see my family fail —"

"Schadenfreude," she volunteered automatically.

"What?"

"It's a German word for pleasure derived from the misfortune of others," quoted Lily.

"Right, anyway," he continued, "my point is, it's hard seeing that — knowing that there are people out there actually rooting for us to fail. And it's not even about the money — we have enough Gold in Gringotts to comfortably finance several generations of Potters — but Pot &amp; Kettle has been in our family for over 300 years. And to say that we shouldn't get a loan simply out of spite is well — it's cruel, you know?" He paused, running the hand that had been in his hair over his face. "I mean, I guess I sort of brought it on myself. I'm not exactly known for wearing my good fortune discreetly." His expression turned bemused. "What? Why are you gaping at me like a guppy?"

"Nothing. That's just remarkably self-aware, coming from you." Lily clapped a hand over her mouth. "Sorry, that was mean. Forget I said that."

A faint smile touched his lips. "It's okay. I like that you're honest. Everyone else talks behind my back. You insult me directly to my face. It's a nice change of pace," and there was the shadow of the James Potter that Lily knew and — well, knew.

"Is there anything I can do to make you feel better?" she asked, because she didn't know what else to say. She wanted to get James out of this maudlin mood — something was deeply wrong with the world when James Potter enumerated his own faults so insightfully.

He leaned in toward her. "How about a game of exploding snap? You know, to take my mind off of things?"

Lily smiled. "I can do that," she said, taking a seat next to him, her agreement to meet Sev in the library completely slipping her mind.

* * *

"Explain dem — demrocracy —"

"—democracy —" corrected Severus.

"— democracy," enunciated Narcissa carefully, "to me again?"

Two hours in to their impromptu talk, Severus had explained the basics of macroeconomic theory to Narcissa, and now had moved onto explaining what exactly Asmodeus Rosier had meant when he had said that the Wizengamot weren't accountable to the population. Amazingly, Narcissa was still listening to him with rapt attention. She was sitting sideways on the sofa next to him, one leg tucked underneath her, so that she was fully facing him, and her long, slender torso was curled around the damask throw pillow that she had clutched to her chest. It was a remarkably casual posture for her to take — he didn't think he'd ever seen her sit that way before.

"Right, you see, British Muggles have something called 'universal suffrage,' which means, basically, that everyone in the country over the age of eighteen is eligible to vote in something called a general election."

"Everyone votes? Even people who don't have seats in the Wizengamot?" she asked, leaning in further toward him, her eyes wide.

"Parliament, and yes, everyone votes, or at least, everyone can vote, although many don't."

The ends of her delicate lips turned down into a frown. "Why ever not?"

"Laziness, apathy, cynicism…take your pick," he said, enumerating on his fingers.

"But…they can choose who is in charge, and they don't even take advantage of that opportunity?"

"Well, some do."

Her eyes clouded over, and she appeared deep in thought. "And Evan's dad's party, what was it called again?"

"The Magical Peoples' Democratic Party of Britain," he supplied easily.

"Right. His party wants to bring that universal suffering —"

"—suffrage—"

"—suffrage to Wizarding Britain?"

"Yes."

"Well, what are they waiting for?" she cried, in an indignant tone that was very uncharacteristic of her. It made him smile.

"It's not that simple. You see, the trouble is, for such a law to pass, the Wizengamot needs to vote in favour of it. And most members of the Wizengamot don't want universal suffrage, because they want to keep political power within their families."

Narcissa's face fell. "Oh. But then, it's never going to pass, is it?" she asked despondently.

"No, probably not."

She knit her delicately arched brows together. "So then, how did Muggles end up with this…democracy?"

"Well, in a lot of countries, what they had to do was have a revolution, where the ordinary people rose up and fought and got rid of the people in power by force."

"Wouldn't a lot of people get killed if that happened?"

"Yes."

Narcissa bit her lip, absently worrying at a thread in the pillow. She locked her eyes with his, a nakedly earnest expression on her face. "Do you think it's justified?" she asked him softly. "Killing people, if it's the only way to change things for the better? The only way to make things more fair and equal for everyone?"

Severus had the impression that a great deal hinged on how he responded to this question. He swallowed around a lump in his throat, and answered with his heart,

"Sometimes, yes, I think it can be."

* * *

1 - Asmodeus is the demon of lust. I thought that was an appropriate first name, given that Rosier is the demon of tainted love and seduction.

2 - I am basing the Wizengamot somewhat on the senate of Ancient Rome, which some differences. Most seats in the Wizengamot are hereditary, but some seats are appointed for life. Ministers in the government also have temporary seats on the Wizengamot. The Minister for Magic is elected by the Wizengamot. Asmodeus Rosier has a hereditary seat.

**Author's Note 2:** This is my favourite chapter so far, and it sets the stage for the political side of the story. I would really, really appreciate your feedback on this chapter, especially.

By the way, I was more than a little amused that the bankruptcy was introduced in chapter **11**.

Thank you also to my fiance, who patiently answered my dumb economics-related questions, like: "Can a family-owned business be publicly traded?" and "how does inflation work?" and "where does the bail out money come from?" If I'd known I'd be writing Pennines one day, I would have taken econ 101 somewhere in the midst of all the cell bio.


	12. Sneak

**Author's Note:** Thank you to **Professor Radar** for the lengthy review. Thank you as always to **aberrantstrain**, although I should warn that this chapter is actually not beta'd because I was too lazy to send it on time, and I actually added a scene to the chapter just this morning.

By the way, someone asked me when there is more sexy stuff coming up. In case anyone else is wondering, it's coming up next chapter, then again in chapters 17 and probably 20.

**Chapter 12: Sneak**

The afternoon following the Slug Club fiasco, Severus and Evan made their way to the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom for the weekly duelling club meeting. When they reached the door, they were ushered in by a stern faced Professor Moody and an over-excited Professor Flitwick, who was hopping about from foot to foot.

"Come in, come in, boys! Meeting's about to start!"

The large room had been cleared, desks and chairs stacked at the back. Around forty or so students, ranging from first year all the way to seventh, milled about, chatting among each other. Most were boys. Across the room, Sirius Black caught Severus's eye, and made a rude gesture, obviously still riled over their argument yesterday. Severus rolled his eyes. Potter, surprisingly, did not get involved. He was standing with his hands in his pockets, head down, the toe of his trainer scuffing at the flagstone floor.

Evan elbowed him in the ribs. "Potter seems oddly subdued today, doesn't he?" he whispered.

But before Severus could answer, Flitwick shot a series of sparks out of his wand.

"Right, right, gather round now, everyone," he said in his preternaturally squeaky voice. "Now, just because we have chosen our Hogwarts representatives for this year's championship at Beauxbatons does not mean that the rest of you can slack off. You must practise hard now if you want to improve your chances next year. And even the rest of you seventh years…you must keep in top form in case Messrs Longbottom or Shacklebolt fall sick and we need to choose a substitute at the last minute!"

Every fall, a series of internal tryouts was held during club meetings to select the two-person team that would represent the school at the prestigious International Student Duelling Championships at the end of the year. The winter and spring terms were devoted to training not just the chosen team, but also all the other students for the following year's tryouts. The championship was only open to fifth years and above.

Severus and Evan had been dreaming of going together since first year. So had Potter and Black.

Moody clapped her hands sharply. "Alright! Into your pairs. Simple disarms and shields to warm up. Fourth years and above…I had better not see your lips moving — silent spells only!" she called out over the din of shuffling feet as twenty pairs of students clambered into formation.

After their warm up, the upper years moved on to two-on-two free form duelling, while third years and below gathered at the front of the room for targeted instruction with Professor Moody. Severus and Evan duelled Longbottom and Shacklebolt. The older students, both holding provisional acceptances into the Aurory pending their NEWT scores, held a slight technical edge over them. But Severus and Evan, having duelled together for over four years now, moved together with easy grace, anticipating each others' movements effortlessly.

When Longbottom had finally managed to disarm Severus (Shacklebolt and Evan were already out), Flitwick came rushing over, an eager smile plastered on his crinkled face.

"It's early days yet, but I think that we've already found our Hogwarts team for next year! What do you say boys?" he asked, turning to the current year's team.

Longbottom had a sour look on his face, but Shacklebolt grinned. "I'll say, these too runts sure gave us a run for our money there!" he boomed good-naturedly.

Flitwick called an end to the session and they piled out of the classroom.

Evan was beaming from ear to ear. "Did you hear what Flitwick said? We're going to Durmstrang next year! Just like we've always wanted. I can't wait!"

They spent the rest of the way back to the dorms arguing about where exactly Durmstrang was located, and if it was true that the only way that they could keep the student body warm was to serve vodka with meals.

* * *

The morning of the Slytherin-Ravenclaw Quidditch match dawned bright and clear. It was the third weekend of January, and the students had been cooped up inside and swamped with homework. As a result, everyone (even the resident swots) were going to be attending the match today. Everyone, that is, apart from Severus and Lily. Lily had suggested that they ought to skip on the match: with the Slytherin dormitories expected to be deserted, it was the 'perfect opportunity' for them to spend some 'quality time' together. When Severus had raised an eyebrow and asked her exactly what this 'quality time' was expected to entail, she only gave him a saucy smirk full of all kinds of filthy promise, and assured him that they would 'think of something.'

Needless to say, Severus had been popping inappropriate boners left and right (but not centre, as his trousers wouldn't allow it) all week in anticipation. He even lost his impromptu debate with Lily the previous day regarding the upcoming referendum on continued membership in the EEC (1), as he was paying rather more attention to the shape of Lily's sumptuous lips than the words that were coming out of them.

_Coming…lips_…oh hell, there he went again.

He had worked out a system with Evan to avoid getting caught. Evan, who was attending the match with everyone else, had agreed to warn Severus as soon as the match was over by way of a matching set of knuts that Severus had charmed to vibrate (_101 uses for protean charms in everyday life!_ the book that Lily had read when she had enchanted the pocket mirrors, really was dead useful). The minimum twenty minute trek from the Quidditch field back to the Slytherin common room would be enough time to sneak Lily back out of the dungeons with no one the wiser. Or so they hoped, anyway.

Severus met up with Lily in the Entrance Hall after breakfast, and they waited until the throngs of students had made their way to the pitch, before starting the long trek down to the dungeons. His stomach felt like it had been taken over by a horde of butterflies, and he regretted the bangers and mash that he had had for breakfast. They walked in awkward silence, darting glances at each other out of the corners of their eyes, and he could feel Lily's nervous anticipation — and holy hell was that arousal already? — seeping through her shields. He was going to be alone in his room with Lily. For hours. A room with a bed. And no other people.

His dick was already hard.

He left Lily outside the entrance while he did a sweep of the common room and the boys dormitories, first. Unfortunately, he couldn't check the girls dormitories, but given that Slytherin was playing today, he felt confident that they were, indeed, as deserted as they looked. He went back outside to fetch Lily, and she followed him up the stairs swiftly.

Once they entered his room, he stood around awkwardly, waiting for her to take the lead. Which, bless the girl, she did immediately.

"So…which one's your bed?" she asked coyly.

"That one in the far corner," he said, pointing it out to her.

She strode over to it purposefully, drew open the hangings, and hopped onto it as casually as if it were her own bed.

He swallowed around the lump in his throat, and went to join her on his bed. He sat beside her, wiping his sweaty palms on the bedspread. She smiled at him and his mouth went dry. She was breathtaking, even in spite of the hideous green paisley blouse that she wore tucked into her flared denims. It was topped with a collar that was tied into an enormous bow over her chest, which gave one the impression that she might catch flight with a particularly strong breeze.

"So…" she said, looking at him expectantly.

"So…" he echoed, looking back at her.

He knew what she was here for. He knew she was waiting for him to make the first move. He just couldn't bring himself to do it. Which was bloody stupid. They had snogged on several occasions already. They had whispered filthy nothings into each other's ears. She had (however briefly) felt the hardness of his erection beneath her hand. So why was he still so bloody nervous around her?

"Here we are, then," she said, smiling hesitantly.

Looking for something to do, he reached out and pulled the bed hangings closed around them, plunging them into total darkness. As if the prospect of making a move hadn't been scary enough already…now he couldn't even bloody _see_ her. He cursed under his breath and flicked his left wrist, his wand sliding easily into his palm from its place in the holster. He really did love that thing.

He muttered a quick _Lumos_ under his breath and chucked his wand down at the end of the bed. It illuminated the inside of his canopied bed with a soft glow that could almost be called romantic. She appeared ethereal in the low light. He reached out a trembling hand and brushed her long auburn hair behind her shoulder, exposing her neck to him. She sighed, her eyes falling closed. He took that as the encouragement that he desperately needed, and leaned forward, pressing a soft kiss just behind her ear. He felt her shudder. He did it again. Then, all of a sudden, she whipped around, taking his face in her hands, and before he had got his bearings back, she had her tongue in his mouth.

Severus prayed to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph that it would take little Regulus Black all damn day to catch the bloody snitch.

* * *

Outside in the stands, the air was brisk, but the skies clear; the sun's unobstructed rays provided some much needed warmth.

James winced as Sirius simultaneously bellowed into his ear and clapped him on the back: "Quaffle's over there, mate."

"I know," he mumbled distractedly.

"Right," said Sirius, and James knew his best friend well enough to hear the eye roll without looking at him, "that would be why you've got your omnioculars pointed at the stands instead of the game, then?"

"Listen, have you seen Lily anywhere? I saw her at breakfast, but I didn't see her walking down, and she's not standing with the girls."

"Maybe she's not feeling well. It _is_ pepper-up season," said Sirius unconcernedly.

James fiddled with the knobs on the omnioculars. "But here's the thing. Snape's missing as well. There's Rosier, Wilkes, Avery, Mulciber, the whole lot. But Snape's not with them. And this is a Slytherin match. Where's he off to then?"

Sirius groaned dramatically. "Oh no, not this again. Jamie, you're obsessed with that stupid bint. Give it a rest, already. Who _cares_ what she's up to, or who she's up to it with?"

"Listen," James said over Sirius's objections, "I'm just going to run back up to Gryffindor tower for a minute. I'll be right back."

"You're going to check that bloody map, aren't you?" growled Sirius, eyes narrowed.

James didn't answer, already making his way out through the packed stands.

Once he was clear of the stands, he ran full out back to castle, and by the time he got up to Gryffindor Tower, his chest was heaving despite his daily Quidditch training. Ordinarily, he would stop to flirt with the fat lady (there was a reason she never ratted them out on all their nightly escapades). But this was important. He needed to know where Lily was…needed to make sure that wherever she was, she was safe. So he stormed through the portrait hole, ignoring her affronted gasp, and up the stairs to the Gryffindor fourth year boy's dormitory. Rummaging through his trunk, he had the map out in a jiffy, and nearly tore it in his haste to unravel it.

"I solemnly swear that I am up to no good," he muttered. His eyes immediately flitted over to the Slytherin boys dormitory, and that's exactly where he spotted them.

Well, somebody was sure up to no good, but it wasn't him. That slimy git had somehow lured Lily into his lair, and who knew what he was going to try with her now that he had her all alone. He _needed_ to rescue her. But how? Even though he knew where the hidden entrance to the Slytherin common room was, there was no way that he could get inside without the password. There was nothing he could do. But he couldn't just leave Lily in Snape's clutches, subject to his mercy…

No, he couldn't take care of this on his own, but he had to do _something_.

He raced back down the stairs, across the common room, out the portrait hole (the fat lady hollering after him all the way), and back out the castle to the quidditch pitch.

When he arrived at the stands, the match was still going strong. Slytherin and Ravenclaw were tied at 90 points each, and according to the commentator, there had been no sign of the snitch yet. He had been hoping that the game would be over by the time that he got back, so that the students would be on their way back to the Slytherin dorms. But James had a hunch that this game was going to be a long one, which meant that Lily could be trapped alone with that snake for hours. And when it came to quidditch, James's hunches tended to ring true.

No he needed to do something, and he needed to do it fast. He dithered in place for a moment at the bottom of the stands, a vague plan starting to form in his head.

Instead of rejoining his friends, James headed up to the teachers' stands. He found Professor McGonagall in her customary place next to the other Heads of House. Slytherin had just scored, and she was cussing up a storm. McGonagall could really be startlingly uncouth when it came to quidditch.

She spotted him as he made his way over to her. "Mr. Potter! What on Earth are you doing here? This area is for professors only."

"I need to speak with you in private, professor," he said urgently.

"Now, Potter? In case it has escaped your notice, we are in the middle of a match at the moment."

"I know, I —" he hesitated.

He had been about to say that he was worried about a fellow student, which was the truth. But it suddenly occurred to him that the truth maybe wasn't the best way to approach this with McGonagall. Even if she took his concerns about Snape seriously (fat chance — the teachers were always giving that slime ball the benefit of the doubt, unable or unwilling to see what was so obvious to James and his friends), she would want to know how he knew that Snape and Lily were in the Slytherin boys' dormitories in the first place. And then what was he supposed to do? It's not like he could tell her about the map. No, he needed to go about this the right way. The _smart_ way.

He tried again: "I wanted to bring an urgent disciplinary matter to your attention, professor."

"A disciplinary matter? You?" McGonagall asked incredulously. James winced. True, he was known more for breaking the rules than for making sure that his fellow student observed them. Well, at least he had her attention, now.

"Yes, it's, uh, about Lily Evans. I know that she was planning to sneak into the Slytherin boys' dorms with Snape today, and I've noticed that neither of them are at the match today…"

McGonagall studied him shrewdly over the square rims of her spectacles. "And how do you know this, Mr. Potter?" she asked sharply.

"I, uh, overheard Lily talking about it with her, uh, friend this morning at breakfast," he improvised.

She raised a pencilled eyebrow. "Her friend? Which friend?"

Bollocks. The old bat was really giving him the third degree here. "Uh…Mary MacDonald."

"Miss MacDonald, you say?" McGonagall considered this for a moment, before motioning for him to follow her. "Alright then, Mr. Potter, come with me."

"What? Where are we going?"

"To talk to Miss MacDonald, of course." The bottom dropped out of his stomach. Blast. Now what had he gotten himself into? He should have known that McGonagall would want to confirm his story before looking any further into it.

They made their way over to where the Gryffindor fourth year girls were sitting. MacDonald was engrossed in the game, and didn't notice their approach.

McGonagall stopped right in front of MacDonald and cleared her throat, getting the girl's attention immediately.

"Professor McGonagall! Is — is something wrong?" MacDonald asked, eyes darting around nervously.

"Miss MacDonald, I'm terribly sorry to interrupt, but if I may borrow a moment of your time?" said McGonagall, not unkindly.

"Certainly, professor," said MacDonald, brow crinkled in confusion. McGonagall gestured to the side of the stands, and they followed her so that they could all speak in privacy.

McGonagall cleared her throat again. "Miss MacDonald, Mr. Potter here tells me that he overheard Miss Evans telling you that she planned to sneak into the Slytherin dormitories this morning to meet up with Mr. Snape?"

Mary frowned, but before she could open her mouth to deny the allegation, James caught her eye from where he was standing next to McGonagall, silently pleading with her that she follow along.

"Well, Miss MacDonald?"

"Y-yes, that's right," she said, cottoning on quickly. James breathed a silent sigh of relief.

McGonagall threw her hands up in the air. "Why on Earth didn't you come to me with this?"

"I, uh, didn't want to get her in trouble." As McGonagall's lips started to thin dangerously, MacDonald rushed to amend her statement. "I mean, I tried to talk her out of it, I _swear_, but she was determined to go, and there was nothing that I could do to change her mind. She — she made me promise not to tell." She hung her head, blinking away tears that had suddenly appeared. "I'm terribly sorry for disappointing you, professor, but she's my best friend. I didn't want to betray her." Damn, MacDonald was _good_.

"Well, then. Thank you for your honesty Miss MacDonald, and your concern, Mr. Potter. I will see to this at once."

James breathed a deep sigh of relief. His ruse had worked. Thank Merlin. Lily would be safe. And that no good snake would get what was coming to him.

* * *

1 - On Thursday Jan 23, 1975, the Labour Cabinet decided that the national referendum on whether Britain would remain part of the European Economic Community would take place before June. (It was held June 5, and 67% voted Yes.) The newspaper article that Sev and Lily read announcing the Cabinet's decision would have appeared on Friday January 24, the day before the Quidditch Match.

**Author's Note 2:** Head on over to AO3 for a copy of the newspaper article and also for a photo of Lily's hideous green paisley blouse!

Please review! I love to hear from you.


	13. Beauty & Brains

**Author's Note:** Ok, first off, I'm really sorry that I missed last week's update. What happened is that I got bit hard by the SS/HG plot bunny fairy. The result, if you are interested, is posted under my profile under the title 'honeytrap.' I'd love for you guys to check it out and let me know what you think of that one as well, since I'm still trying to decide how to prioritize updates between Honeytrap and Pennines. So tell me which one you like better, and which one you think I should focus on (or if you think I should alternate updates between the two).

Next order of business: there is sexy stuff in this chapter, so proceed with caution!

Thank you to **Professor Radar** for reviewing the last chapter, and as always thanks for the follows/faves. And an extra special thank you to **Relish RedShoes** for speedily looking this chapter over last night!

**Chapter 13: Beauty &amp; Brains**

Back in the Slytherin dorms, Severus and Lily were now lying side by side on top of the bedclothes, snogging furiously. Well, Lily was snogging him furiously, but Severus's mind had started to wander some time ago. He couldn't stop himself from dwelling on the way that Lily had brushed him off last Saturday when he had asked her opinion on Pot &amp; Kettle. He had been preoccupied by it all week. He wanted, badly, to ask her about it, but he also recognized that when a girl had her tongue in your mouth, it was definitely not the proper time to ask her any heartfelt questions. Or any questions at all, really. So he ignored the bothersome little voice in the back of his head, and tried to lose himself in the slide of Lily's eager tongue against his own.

It was a futile effort.

"Lily…" he murmured between kisses. "Lily, wait." He drew back slightly, trying to end the kiss, but Lily simply followed him. He raised his hand up to her shoulder, holding her in place as he turned his head to the side. She took that as a cue to start nuzzling his neck. "Lily!"

She finally pulled back. "What's the matter? Why'd you stop?" she asked breathlessly. Her eyes were glazed over, her cheeks flushed and lips swollen. She looked positively debauched. Why had he stopped again? Oh yeah. He'd gotten it into his thick head that they needed to talk, and he was too bloody-minded to leave well enough alone.

"Nowt's (1) the matter. I just — I want to ask you a question."

She goggled at him. "You want to ask me a question? _Now_?"

"Sorry — I just — I can't get it out of my head," he mumbled.

She huffed a breath, eyes flicking upward. "Alright then, what's it you want to know?"

"Remember last week? Slug Club?"

She nodded imperceptibly.

"Remember how I asked you afterwards what you thought of the whole Pot &amp; Kettle thing?"

She nodded again and motioned impatiently for him to continue.

"Well, you said 'I agree with you, I suppose,' and then sort of ran off, and every time I've brought it up over the past week, you've changed the subject. What's that all about?"

"Sev —"

He raised his hand. "No, listen, if you disagree with me, just tell me. Don't give me the brush off."

The set of her jaw turned rigid. "Well, it didn't seem like you lot wanted a girl's opinion, anyway," she snapped.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" he stammered.

She scoffed. "Oh come off it — it's always like that at Slug Club. You boys talking all over each other about politics like it's some pissing contest…making it clear there's no room for a girl in the conversation."

He opened his mouth to deny it, but then came up short as the memory of last Saturday came to the forefront of his mind. He flushed with shame. Maybe she wasn't completely off base, after all. "Is — is that how you really feel?" he asked softly.

She was silent for a long moment, then sighed. "Yes, I do," she said quietly. "But…that's not the real reason I've been avoiding the subject."

"Then what the hell is it?" he snapped. He was getting tired of her mind games.

Lily bit her lip, slanting her eyes down. "The truth is, I'm not sure that I fully understand what all you were talking about. And I — I didn't want to say something that would make me look stupid in front of you."

"You make me look stupid all the time when it comes to schooling me on feminism," he pointed out.

"No listen. You — you think I'm smart —"

"— You are smart —"

"— You think I'm smart," she repeated, "and I like that you think I'm smart. I like that you're interested in smart girls, that you like me for my brain. But you have to understand, Sev, you're brilliant. And I love that about you, but it also makes me insecure. God, sometimes I catch myself running through what I'm going to say in my head first, before I say it out loud. It's — it's exhausting!" He jumped as she slammed the bed with the palm of her hand.

"You don't have to do that!"

The fight suddenly left her eyes. "I _know._ I know I'm being ridiculous. But Sev, I'm scared you're going to realize I'm not as smart as you think I am. That I'm not smart enough for you," she admitted.

Severus was quiet for a long moment. Lily was afraid that she wasn't smart enough for him? He suppressed the urge to smile. The very idea that Lily, of all people, could feel insecure in relation to _him_. He couldn't help it — he was deeply flattered. But he came back down to Earth at the miserable look on Lily's face. He rushed to reassure her. "I know how you feel. I — I feel the same way, sometimes."

Lily's jaw dropped. "What? Sev, but you're so much smarter than me, how could you possibly —"

Severus brought a finger to Lily's lips, and she immediately fell silent. "You're so beautiful, it's intimidating," he said in complete earnestness. He held her gaze for a long moment, swiftly entering her mind and projecting his insecurity to her, so that she would have no doubt that he was being truthful. At her soft gasp, he averted his eyes, the excruciating vulnerability of baring his insecurities to her becoming too much for him to stand. "I mean, I know it's superficial, and probably breaking some feminist rule or other, but sometimes I look at you and I wonder: what is such a pretty girl doing talking to me?"

When he looked back up at her, there were tears in her eyes. "You've — you've never called me beautiful before. Actually, you never comment on my appearance at all," she said in a small voice, and there was that miserable look on her face again.

Was she really so insecure about herself? He suddenly felt bad for holding out on her. Weren't blokes supposed to tell their girlfriends how beautiful they were?

He sighed. "I know."

"Why is that?" she asked him, her brow furrowed.

"Partly because I don't want to come off as superficial. I don't want you to think I'm only interested in you because of what you look like," he explained slowly.

It was the truth. Complimenting a feminist on her looks was like navigating a minefield. All he had wanted to do was to make her feel that he respected her as a person — as his equal. But in doing that, he had forgotten that at the core of the outspoken feminist lived an insecure teenage girl who just wanted to know that her boyfriend thought she was pretty.

Lily wiped her eyes with her hand and nudged him on the shoulder. "And?"

"And what?"

"What's the other part of it?" she pressed.

He dropped his eyes to the bedspread, studying the weave intensely in the low light. "It's stupid. You're going to laugh at me," he mumbled.

"I won't laugh." She raised her right hand in the air. "Promise."

His eyes didn't stray from the bedspread as he spoke. "I'm scared that one day you're going to wake up and realize that you're extremely good looking and decide that you can do better than me. And I know it's silly, but part of me reckons that if I compliment your looks, you'll only come to realize it sooner."

Blast her, she did laugh. But it was a kind-hearted, melodious sort of tinkling laugh. "Oh Sev, I already know that I'm really good looking. I'm not _blind_." Right. Of course, everyone with eyes would know that Lily Evans was good looking. Including Lily Evans.

"You're also in no danger whatsoever of being too modest," he grumbled.

"No, but seriously, Sev. I know I'm sort of a catch." She rolled on top of him, reaching for his arms and wrapping them around her waist. Then, she took his face between her hands and looked him directly in the eye. Their faces were so close that their noses nearly touched. "But, I want to be caught by you. You're the one who makes me ache between my legs," she said, rolling her hips against his in a way that made him harden instantly beneath her. "You're the one I think about when I touch myself at night." Severus lunged upward, capturing her lips with his own in a bruising kiss.

"I thought you wanted to talk?"

"We're done talking," he mumbled into her mouth.

He rolled her over so that she was on her back, with him laying on his side next to her, his weight supported on his right elbow. He leaned in to kiss her again, his free hand coming to rest on her slender waist. He drew little circles there over the silky fabric of her blouse and felt her shiver. She threw her head back, and he dipped down, pressing sloppy kisses down the column of her neck, the hollow of her throat. He felt her hand on his, guiding it up the smooth expanse of her front, until his fingers met the edge of something round and firm. She let go of him then, and his hand coasted up the side of it, instinctively palming her breast. She moaned low in her throat and pushed herself further into his hand. He ghosted a thumb over the centre of her breast and felt the flesh there pucker and harden instantly. The satin of her shirt was so thin that he could feel the little bumps and ridges of her nipple through it. She gasped. He did it again. She whimpered. He did it again. Her hands came up to her chest, and he froze, sure that she was going to push him away.

But she didn't push him away. Instead, her nimble fingers first untied that ghastly bow, then started working the buttons of her blouse, popping them one by one, then finally reached down to untuck the whole thing from her denims. When she was done, the blouse gaped in the middle, revealing the secret that that ridiculous bow had hidden so well — she wasn't wearing a bra (good God, why wasn't she wearing a bra?).

Fucking hell, those were her tits, then, right there in front of his face. Well. He hadn't been expecting _that_.

He recovered well enough for a boy his age who has just unexpectedly been confronted with his first set of real live tits. Right. First order of business, Snape: eyes up. He reluctantly raised his eyes and the expression on her face stole his breath away — she was regarding him with such naked (no pun intended) vulnerability, such tender trust. This was his girl, and she was revealing her beautiful body to him in the utmost love — and god, when did he get to be such a fucking sap? This was his girl, and she was showing him her tits, and he had better not fuck it up or else she'd slap him and put those lovely titties away, and wouldn't that be a crime?

So he reached out a tentative hand and — easy does it, Snape, don't startle them now — brushed the backs of his knuckles against her far left collarbone. "You are so beautiful," he told her tits, because it sounded like the right thing to say in that moment, and she probably graced him with a small smile, but he wouldn't know, because his eyes had lost the battle with his dick and slipped back down from her face again. She hadn't slapped him yet, so maybe she didn't mind too much that he was ogling her the way Crabbe and Goyle ogled the Hogwarts Express food trolley on the first of September every year.

He trailed the back of his hand lower — gently now! — down toward where his eyes were unfortunately glued, and felt her flesh break out in goose pimples as he went. When he reached the dip and swell of her breast, he turned his hand around, and inched it closed, until he was cupping her fully in the palm of his hand. He could see her rosy little nipple just peeking out, poking the sensitive flesh at the join of his thumb and forefinger. The feel of it made his dick throb deliciously in his pants.

He groaned. "Oh God, I can't believe I'm touching your tits," he said, his voice echoing in the dead silence of the canopied bed, then immediately dropped his head onto her shoulder. He felt the blush rising up the back of his neck, turning his cheeks unbearably hot. "Fuck, I didn't mean to say that out loud," he murmured into the dip of her collarbone. She giggled, and he felt her hot little tit jiggle in time with her mirth, where it was still cupped within his left hand.

That giggle turned into a throaty moan when the jiggling motion rubbed her nipple back and forth against his palm. He rubbed his palm in wider circles, but suddenly she winced. "Ow. It's chafing."

"S-sorry," he muttered, stilling his hand. He wished he'd known that she was planning to show him her tits today, because he would have made sure to read up on what exactly he was meant to do with them. (Apart from staring at them like a dunderhead).

"L-lick your hand and try that again." He licked his palm, feeling like a right old idiot, but it was worth it when he returned his open hand to her breast, repeating the light circling motion on her nipple. It grew even harder and she was panting and sighing non-stop now. His eyes drifted over to the right. Fuck, how he wanted to take that dusky little peak into his mouth and suck.

He started kissing down her neck, working his way down to give her some time to get used to his mouth in that area. He kissed the inside of her breast and she arched her back, practically presenting the tip of it to his mouth. He cautiously extended his tongue, sweeping it in a wide arc around the whole dusky point of her breast. She whined, and he felt a hand grip the back of his neck, clasping his mouth to her breast.

"Don't stop," she gasped. "Feels good."

He closed his mouth around her tit, sucking on it gently, flicking with the tip of his tongue, swirling, laving, everything he could think of. It all seemed to be to her liking, because she was making noises he hadn't thought her capable of, whining like this was hurting her, almost, except he knew by the pressure on the back of his head that it definitely wasn't.

"Keep — keep moving your hand…on the other…one…." she managed to get out between gasping breaths. In his eagerness, he had focused all of his attention on her left breast, and forgotten to keep moving his hand on her right. He rectified that immediately. The simultaneous attention to both breasts seemed to lose her whatever control she had had before, because now she started to writhe on the bed, her narrow hips humping the empty air desperately. Her little whimpers had him hard as a brick in his keks (2), and it was getting really quite uncomfortable, but he didn't dare stop to adjust himself.

He couldn't believe how sensitive she was. Certainly his own nipples wouldn't reduce him to a gibbering mess like this. Finally, after what seemed like hours, she seemed to have had enough. The hand on the back of his neck pinched him, and her other arm came up, knocking his left hand away from her breast.

He pulled his mouth off of her with a soft pop. A thread of saliva trailed from his mouth down to her nipple, glistening in the low wand light. "What's the matter," he asked, alarmed. "Did — did I hurt you?"

"No I just — I can't take anymore. It's too much." Her hips were still undulating, seemingly of their own accord.

She started to button up her shirt. He was about to point out the little sheer circles on her blouse that her saliva slickened nipples had left on her blouse, but thought better of it. A moment later, they were covered up by that ghastly bow, anyway. He was sad to see her tits covered up again, of course, but his knut, where it sat in his pocket, had yet to vibrate, so they could still sit and talk awhile. He was content enough just to have her to himself.

But she appeared to have other ideas, tucking her shirt in and moving to climb off of the bed.

He caught her wrist, his heart fluttering in panic (and wasn't that just pathetic). "Where are you off to so soon? We've still got time."

"I — I have to go," she said, not meeting his eyes. She was occluding, though still radiating embarrassment. So…she was hiding something. Something…embarrassing?

"Why? What have you got to do right now that's so important?" he asked, annoyed. This was supposed to be their time. Alone. Together.

"I —" She bit her lip, flushing crimson. "Don't make fun, but, you've got me so worked up that I — I need to go back to my room and — and finish the job."

Finish the job? What did she — OH. Oh My God. Finish the job. That meant — she meant. Oh holy hell. She couldn't mean _that_, could she?

His stunned silence caused her to raise her free hand, covering her face in mortification.

"Lily, you can't just _say_ things like that."

"Why — why not?" she mumbled from between her fingers.

"Because how the hell am I supposed to just sit here 20 minutes from now, knowing that you're across the castle, frigging yourself —"

"Don't — don't call it that!"

"— fine, touching yourself — without…without going crazy from arousal!"

She peeked at him from between her fingers. "You — you think it's — sexy?"

"That I got you so worked up sucking on your tits that you have to go back to your room and frig — sorry, touch — yourself? Yes, I think it's fucking sexy as hell. Twenty minutes from now, I'm going to be having a wank thinking about you having yourself a wank."

Finally, her eyes fully met his own, a tentative smile lighting up her face. "R-really?"

"Hells, yes."

"I — I'd like that," she said softly.

He had a sudden stroke of brilliant inspiration. "You know…maybe we could use those mirrors…"

"Don't push it."

* * *

(1) - Local slang for 'nothing'.

(2) - Local slang for trousers.

* * *

**Author's Note 2:** Thanks for reading, and please review! Also, I am desperately looking for a Brit-picker, so if anyone is interested, please message me!


	14. The Snitch

**Author's Note:** Thank you to **Snapeslittleblackbuttons** for her speedy beta job on this! Go check out her stories! Go! But read this first.

**Chapter 14: The Snitch**

Lily righted herself and started toward the door, Sev following behind her.

_Maybe we could use those mirrors._

Oh, honestly. Sev could be a right little perv when it suited him, Lily was beginning to learn.

Not that she was so innocent herself. Her knickers, slick with her arousal, attested to that fact. God, his hands, his mouth — they had been everywhere. And it had felt so, so unbelievably good. So much better than when she played with her own nipples. But it had made her throb so badly between her thighs that she just couldn't take it anymore. Even now, with every step that she took, her folds rubbed together, the delicious friction bringing her to the brink. It was agonizing, and she had no idea how she was going to make it back to Gryffindor tower without having an orgasm on the way there. Could you even have an orgasm simply from walking? Well, she was sure going to find out.

She had just made it down the boys' dormitory stairs and taken her first few steps into the Slytherin common room when she caught sight of something that made her come to a sudden stop.

It was McGonagall. In the Slytherin common room. Arms crossed. Lips practically invisible, they were so thin.

Her heart skipped a beat in her chest. Oh God, this was a nightmare.

"Miss Evans," she began in a tone that could frost over a tin of anti-freeze, "what, precisely, are you doing in the Slytherin boys' dormitories?"

Lily's mind went completely blank. "I — Uhhhh…" she supplied unhelpfully.

"Indeed, Miss Evans."

If Lily had thought things couldn't get any worse, she realized she was sadly mistaken when she heard footsteps behind her and noticed McGonagall's eyes drift upward. Her own eyes slid shut as her heart thawed then dropped in her chest, settling somewhere in the region of her appendix. That was Sev, coming up behind her. As if being caught _alone_ in the Slytherin boys' dorms wasn't bad enough…

McGonagall, for her part, did not look best pleased by this latest development. "Ah, Mr. Snape. How kind of you to join us. Perhaps you can enlighten us as to Miss Evans's presence in the — might I remind you — Slytherin boys' dormitories."

"Uhhhh…" came Sev's panicked voice from somewhere behind her. She was too afraid to turn around — too afraid to move, even — to see him.

"Yes, that was Miss Evans's illuminating explanation. I had hoped that you might be able to offer a more articulate one."

At that moment, the door to the Slytherin common room, which was really just a nondescript expanse of dungeon wall, slid open, and they were saved from having to answer any further. In waddled the corpulent form of Horace Slughorn, his great walrus moustache and round belly preceding him into the room.

"Minerva, there you are, what is all this about Miss Evans and the Slytherin common — oh! Hello, there, Miss Evans, Mr. Snape," he greeted jovially. "Come by for a quick visit, eh?"

"A visit?" said McGonagall tetchily. "I would hardly call what is going on here something so innocuous as a visit. Miss Evans, Mr. Snape, each of you: 50 points off and one week's worth of detention starting Monday."

Lily calculated quickly in her head. Her birthday fell on the last Friday of January this year, which was the coming Friday. And that meant…

"One week! But — but that means I'll have detention on my birthday! I can't have detention on my birthday," she insisted.

McGonagall raised her brows. "Oh I assure you, Miss Evans, you can. And you will."

Lily stamped her foot. "But! But that's unfair!"

"Perhaps, Miss Evans," intoned McGonagall, a frown bracketing her mouth, "you should have thought of that before you decided that that the school rules did not apply to you."

Lily felt her lip begin to quiver and her eyes started to water. Sev always did something nice for her birthday, and she was so looking forward to it this year, what with them being a couple and everything….

Slughorn looked almost as gutted as Lily felt. "Oh, come now, Minerva. Surely you can make an exception for Miss Evans just this once."

"I will do no such thing —"

"Professor," Sev piped up from behind her, "this whole thing was my idea…punish me, but please don't punish Lily. It was all my fault."

Lily's heart leaped in hope at Sev's words.

"That is not the story I was told," said McGonagall, peering at her sternly from over her spectacles. "While I appreciate your noble intentions, Mr. Snape, you in fact do Miss Evans, here, a great disservice in your continual efforts to shield her from the consequences of her own actions."

"Now, Minerva —" began Slughorn, his pudgy hands coming up in an appeasing gesture.

McGonagall turned her head, pinning him in place with a gimlet eye. "You as well, Professor." Suitably chastised, Slughorn's hands fell to his side, and he peered down at his shoes. Or rather, he would have, if his great big belly hadn't been in the way.

The tiny speck of hope that had taken root when Sev spoke up sputtered and died, to be replaced with a hot rush of anger. What a horrendous _witch_ McGonagall was. She was probably just bitter that nobody ever did anything nice for _her_ birthday, the shriveled old maid.

"Now then," said McGonagall briskly. "I'll walk you back to Gryffindor tower, Miss Evans."

Lily opened her mouth to object, but fell silent as McGonagall's lips started their famous thinning act. She fell in step behind her professor, waiting until the old prune's back was turned before whipping around quickly to mouth "mirror" at Sev before she stepped through the door and out into the hall. Just before the dungeon wall rematerialized behind her, she caught Sev's discreet nod, and she knew that he had got her meaning.

Lily trudged back to Gryffindor tower with McGonagall in seething silence. When they reached the portrait hole, McGonagall turned to her with a solemn expression.

"I am — _disappointed _in your behaviour today, Miss Evans," she said in a tone of voice that made Lily's gut twist uncomfortably, even though she was still angry with her head of house. "By rights, I shouldn't be telling you this, but I had very much hoped to see you as a prefect next year. Needless to say, that won't come to fruition unless you get your priorities in order."

"Yes, professor," Lily mumbled at the stonework beneath her feet, unable to look her head of house in the face. McGonagall wanted her as prefect? Well, _had _wanted her. She had probably ruined her chances with her little stunt today.

"Go on up, then, Miss Evans," McGonagall continued in a softer tone. Might as well enjoy the rest of your weekend, as you'll be serving detention with Mr. Filch come Monday."

When Lily looked up, McGonagall was gone.

She heard a clucking noise from behind her, and realized that it was coming from the Fat Lady. "And what have you been up to, young lady?"

Lily rolled her eyes and clambered through the portrait hole without dignifying her with a response. She just caught the end of the Fat Lady's diatribe — such rudeness from these fourth years today! — before the portrait slammed shut behind her.

She made her way morosely up the stairs and over to her bed, pulling her pocket mirror out of her trunk on the way. She threw herself backward on the bed with a deep sigh, then rolled over onto her side, flicking open the mirror to Sev's anxious face. He had been waiting for her.

"Lily! Are you alright? I'm so sorry about what happened —"

"It's alright Sev, it's not your fault. I'm just upset that we don't get to spend my birthday together," she said glumly.

"We'll celebrate it the next night instead, then. How's that?"

Lily managed a weak smile for Sev's sake. He was trying so hard to cheer her up. He had tried to take the blame for her, and it really hadn't been his fault in the first place. It had been as much her — wait a minute! It hadn't been Sev's fault. But whose was it, then?

Severus seemed to be having a similar train of thought. "What I want to know," he said slowly, "is how McGonagall knew where to find us. We were so careful not to be seen —"

It all clicked into place in Lily's head suddenly, and she was overcome with a rush of anger. "Well, someone told McGonagall."

"You think?" asked Severus.

"I'm sure of it. Remember, she said, 'That's not the story I was told.' Someone snitched on us."

"But who?" asked Severus, scratching his head in bafflement.

Oh, honestly, was he going to make her spell it out for him? "Isn't it obvious," she snapped. "It was your friend, Evan Rosier. I told you you shouldn't have told him anything."

Sev's jaw dropped open. "Evan? No. No way. He wouldn't rat on me," said Sev, shaking his head. "He was the one helping us out!"

"Exactly. He was the only one who knew."

"Why would he rat on us?" asked Severus. She could she him clench and unclench his fist.

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe because he doesn't like me?"

"That's — that's not true!"

Lily just fixed him a pointed stare that made him look away, his flushed cheeks giving him away.

But he still wasn't willing to accept the obvious. "So, you didn't tell _anyone?_ Not a single person?" he asked dubiously.

"No! Who would I tell, anyway? Nobody knows about us."

Severus raised a sharp eyebrow. "Nobody?" Damn it. Did he know that Mary knew? He must. He must have read it in her mind that day in Hogsmeade.

Lily swallowed over the lump in her throat. "No. Nobody. I didn't tell anybody, Sev," she said. It was a lie. But, still, Mary _couldn't _be the snitch — Lily hadn't told her that she was meeting up with Sev today. Mary would've just given her grief about it, anyway. No, it had to be Rosier — nobody else had been in a position to tell.

Severus held her gaze for a long moment, and Lily was grateful that legilimency wasn't possible through mirrors. "Alright, then," he finally sighed, running a hand through his hair, and Lily felt herself relax. "But, I still don't think Evan said anything. He wouldn't."

Lily wondered if he was trying to convince her or himself. She did feel for Sev, really. To find out your friend had pretended to help you, only to rat on you behind your back. That was rough. And for it to be Rosier of all people...Rosier, who Sev had been growing even closer to as of late. Lily fancied herself a perceptive person. She knew how important it had become recently for Sev to feel like he had friends other than her. _Male_ friends. Lily was his best friend, but Rosier had become his best mate.

But as much as she wanted to spare Sev's feelings, she knew that in the long run, it was better for the truth to come out now. Sev needed to know that his so called best mate was a two faced liar and a rat. He needed to know so that he wouldn't trust Rosier with anything else in the future.

"I really hope, for your sake, that you're right, Sev…"

Sev still looked troubled by the time she bid him goodbye and closed her mirror up.

* * *

The next morning, Lily was cornered by a frantic looking Potter as she made her way through to the Common Room on her way to breakfast.

"Evans! Lily! Are you okay?" he asked, face twisted in worry. It was an odd expression to see on him. He reached his hands out toward her, but thankfully seemed to think better of it, taking a step back from her.

"Uh…yeah. Why wouldn't I be?" asked Lily, bemused. Potter sure was acting odd. Even for him.

"Where the hell have you been? I didn't see you all day yesterday. I came looking for you after the match."

"Oh. I — I was in my room." She had been in such a poor mood after McGonagall's parting words, that she hadn't even bothered to emerge for meals.

Potter ran a hand through his hair, ruffling it. But this time, the gesture had an air of anxiety about it, rather than an air of arrogance. "All day? Did…did something happen to upset you yesterday?"

"You could say that," she muttered darkly.

His expression turned grim. "What did that slimy git do? Just tell me, Lily, and I'll go find him and hex the stuffing out of him right away."

Lily found herself utterly lost in this conversation, and was quickly getting fed up. "What the hell are you going on about Potter?"

"Snape! I knew the creep was going to try something yesterday…that's why I was so worried that he had you all alone in his room. Just tell me what he did, Lily, it's okay," he said soothingly.

"What the hell are you talking about? Sev didn't do anything," she said, bristling with indignation of Sev's behalf.

Now it was Potter's turn to look confused. "Then why are you so upset?"

"I got detention," she said. Why else would she be upset? "Wait. Hang on. How did you know I was with Sev yesterday?"

"What?" asked Potter, suddenly looking nervous. That was the look of a Potter who was hiding something.

Lily narrowed her eyes. "Hang on, were you the prick who snitched on us?"

"I don't know what you're talking about Evans," he said unconvincingly. He really was a crap liar.

"Oh my God, it was you! You told McGonagall, didn't you!" she yelled in outrage. A group of first years in the corner stopped chattering among themselves and looked up at the commotion.

"It's not like that, Evans. I — I was only worried about you —"

But Lily was incensed. "I have detention on my birthday because of you, asshole!"

For what it was worth, he appeared genuinely surprised. "Detention? Why do you have detention? If anyone should have detention it should be Snape!"

"Oh, he does too. We both do. A whole week's worth. Thanks to _you_," she emphasized her point by poking him in the chest with her index finger.

"But you didn't do anything wrong!" he exclaimed, throwing up his hands.

She continued to advance on him. "How do you figure that? You know I snuck into Slytherin House with Sev yesterday. After all, you're the one who told on us."

"You snuck — hang on, what were you doing with the slimy git all alone in the Slytherin boys dorms, anyway?" he asked, a note of suspicion colouring his voice.

Lily blanched and quickly said the first thing that came to mind. "Homework!"

"Homework? In the Slytherin boys dorms? Why didn't you just go to the library?"

"Be…cause I wanted an excuse to see the Slytherin Common Room," she improvised. "Not that it's any of your business, Potter!"

"You wanted to see the Slytherin Common Room?" asked Potter disbelievingly.

"Yeah. Wouldn't you?" He looked like he was about to argue, but realized that he couldn't on that point. "What I want to know, Potter, is how you knew that I snuck into Slytherin in the first place. Are you stalking me again?"

His eyes widened behind his glasses. "What? No! Of course not!"

Lily narrowed her own eyes in turn. "Then how did you know where I was?"

"I — I — I guessed," he stammered.

"You…guessed?" Lily repeated dubiously.

"Yeah. I, uh, noticed that neither you or Snape were at the match, and I figured you were off somewhere together, and I, uh, reckoned maybe he took you back to his room."

She raised a sceptical brow. "You reckoned?"

"I reckoned," he said firmly.

Lily stared at him intently, her eyes boring holes in his. Oh, how she wished she could be a legilimens for a day. "There's something fishy about you Potter," she finally said. "You seem to alway know exactly where I am and who I'm with. I don't know how you know. But I promise you, one day, I'm going to find out."

* * *

Later that night, as Lily was getting ready for bed, she heard an odd ringing sound coming from her trunk. What on Earth? It almost sounded like a…telephone. But there weren't any telephones at Hogwarts. Certainly she would have known if she was harbouring one in her trunk.

"What the hell is that racket!" yelled Marlene from the next bed over.

"I — I don't know," said Lily.

"Well, it's coming from your trunk, so can you go shut it the hell up?" Marlene grumbled back.

Lily opened her trunk, shifting things around, looking for the source of the noise. It was coming from…her mirror?! What the hell? Then suddenly it hit her…Sev must have been experimenting with protean charms. He had been complaining lately about how the mirrors were missing a way to call each other. Well, apparently he had found a way to call her mirror. Literally. She felt a smile break out on her face. Sev really could be quite clever with charms when it suited him.

She grabbed the mirror and clambered onto her bed, drawing the hangings for privacy, before casting a _Muffliato_ that encompassed herself and the mirror.

She opened the mirror to Sev's grinning face.

"So it worked!" he exclaimed, eyes lighting up with excitement.

"Yeah. Clever touch making it ring like a telephone. But it's a little loud. Marlene here nearly had a fit."

His grin faded. "Sorry. I'll work on that."

"It's a good idea, though, Sev. I like it."

"Thanks. Listen, Lily…I wanted to talk to you about Evan."

"Sev…"

"No, hear me out, Lily," he said, forestalling her with a raised hand. "I know what you're going to say. You're going to say I'm just defending him because he's my friend. But I'm not. I really looked. Because, believe me, if he ratted on me, I'd want to know, okay? So I didn't hold back when I looked. And I didn't pick up on anything remotely suspicious. I really, really don't think it was him. Truly."

"Okay, Sev. I believe you," she said quickly.

"Really?"

She sighed. "Yeah. If you say you looked and you didn't find anything, then I trust you."

"Thanks, Lils, you're the best," he said, his face splitting into a relieved grin that made Lily's stomach twist with guilt. She knew she should tell Sev that Potter had been the one to snitch on them. But just as she had been about to do so, something had stopped her short.

No, Lily rationalized. It really was for the best not to say anything. Sev was liable to fly off the handle wherever Potter was concerned. If Sev knew Potter had been the snitch…well, he was bound to lose all sense of proportion and retaliate. And the last thing she wanted to do was to contribute to the animosity between the two boys. Besides, James had only told McGonagall because he was worried about her. As unfounded as his concerns had been, he had had good intentions. James didn't know that she was dating Sev, so of course he would have jumped to the worst possible conclusions and assumed that Sev was taking advantage of her. Really, he was only looking out for her safety. And Sev would never see it that way.

So it was better for everyone if she just kept James's involvement in this to herself. The truth would only cause trouble.

But in the meantime, she wasn't going to let James off the hook so easily. He had gotten awfully nervous when she had questioned how he had known that she was in the Slytherin common room. He was hiding something from her, and she was determined to know what.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Please review! It lets me know that people are still interested and reading this story! It's sort of depressing to see Honeytrap receiving more attention than Pennines. :/


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